Labs

Carrera's PC is powerful in Windows applications and games, and comes with a large hard disk and surround-sound speakers. It would have been even better with a FireWire port.

FEATURES

The Octan CS-02 is housed in a professional-looking Cooler Master case that has plenty of room for future expansion. Annoyingly, though, it has no memory card reader. The wired Microsoft keyboard and mouse are comfortable to use.

The Octan is one of only two PCs on test

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with surround-sound speakers, and its Creative Inspire P5800 set is ideal for gaming. It's also one of only two PCs to include a large 250GB hard disk. The system has a one-year onsite warranty.

The 17" Sony flat-panel monitor is easy to adjust, so you can set it up in a comfortable position. Its backlight is slightly uneven, though, and white areas of the screen were not totally pure. Carrera's graphics card has two DVI outputs, so you could always connect a second LCD screen digitally.

PERFORMANCE

This PC uses a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor and 1GB of RAM, making it one of the fastest on test. It beat every challenger in our application benchmarks, scoring 156 overall. Its video-encoding score of 180 is impressive, but with no FireWire port it needs an upgrade to make it suitable for editing digital video footage.

In our Doom 3 test, the Octan lost the top spot to the PC Nextday system, but wasn't far behind. It scored 39.8fps, which proves that its 256MB ATI Radeon X800GT graphics card is a good choice for gaming.