Product Reviews

Systemax combines AMD's Athlon XP 1800+ chip with Microsoft's up-coming Windows XP to great effect - producing a PC that is both state-of-the-art and a powerful performer.

Of course, from the outside it looks like any other PC: none too pretty, with a dubious attempt at styling in the form of some detailing on the case. The monitor is nice enough looking, however, and more importantly it was easy on my eyes - though only after some prolonged fiddling with the on-screen display. Of course, most users never twiddle with anything other than brightness and contrast and would, in this case, find themselves staring at a bowed and rather distorted image. To save your eyes from unnecessary strain, it's well worth making sure your monitor is correctly set up.

Inside the case, there's plenty of memory: 256Mb of fast PC2100 DDR RAM to be exact. That's great, because while Windows XP works well enough with 128Mb of memory, 256Mb is recommended.

There's plenty of room inside the case for admiring such components because Simply has kindly tied down every single lead and cable. Power leads from the 16-speed DVD drive, the 16xCD-R 10xCD-R/W 32xCD CD writer, the hard disk and floppy disks are bound tightly together with an obsessive zeal. Of course, tying down the cables is fine until you come to upgrading, fixing or fiddling about. Then the cable ties will become a headache requiring chopping, rearranging and replacing.

The 40Gb IBM 60GXP hard disk, compared to the 100Gb whopper in this month's Evesham may appear small, but you needn't think that way. This amount of space should keep you going for years. Indeed, combined with the plentiful RAM and a decent video card in the form of a Gainward-built

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GeForce2 MX 400 sporting 64Mb of its own, this system is designed to show off the performance of the Athlon XP chip. And it succeeds in a rather startling way.

Running our standard benchmarks produced an overall score of 5405 - indicating blisteringly fast performance and putting the scores notched up by Pentium 4 systems in the deepest shade. Now, Intel has made a lot of noise about the way many standard benchmarks are unable to reflect the true performance of the Pentium 4 and this is probably likely to be true of the tests we run at Buyer. Nevertheless, the fact that a Systemax 2GHz Pentium 4 system we tested last month scored 2024 in our tests definitely indicates that the Athlon XP is doing something right.

The machine's 3D performance was equally impressive, racking up a cracking 5935 in 3DMark 2000. In 2001 it managed a score of 2581, which is just as jaw-dropping. This will have Lara Croft running quickly enough to keep even her most ardent fan happy.

We were rather dubious at first over the AMD's Athlon XP model numbering system, but the performance test scores lend them some credibility after all. The XP 1800+ chip only runs at a clock speed of 1.53GHz, but AMD haven't called it the XP 1500+, as they claim this wouldn't give a true indication of its capabilities. Instead, the model numbers are intended to give an idea of speed compared to the previous generation of Athlons, which used the Thunderbird core (see page 82). We were skeptical at first, but the benchmark results take some ignoring.

Aside from providing the components to make up a truly fast system at a reasonable price, Simply has done a number of things with this PC that we think merit its inclusion in the Buyer hall of fame. Mostly, it has avoided substituting dodgy components in other less performance-related areas. It has steered clear of a combined DVD-cum-CD-R/W drive, for instance - instead, providing seperate drives to make disc-to-disc copies that bit more straightforward. Systemax has also opted for a competent Sound Blaster Player 5.1 sound card rather than integrated sound. There are some extras, such as the Sidewinder game pad, yet the budget still includes the desirable SmartSuite Millennium software package.

AMD's Athlon XP 1800+ has a great debut in this cracking system.