Systemax P1500RV Lifestyle 0370

We're now into the third month of the Pentium 4, and a clearer picture of what to expect and what it might cost is starting to emerge. There are the high-end systems like Compaq's Deskpro Workstation 300 (reviewed issue 75, p151) and Evolution's P4-1400R (reviewed issue 76, p132) which leverage performance using SCSI or RAID disk controllers, and for which you pay handsomely. Then there are the less ambitious designs, like the Systemax P1500RV Lifestyle 0370.

Machines like this usually sell for under £2,000, and don't feature souped-up disk arrays and the like, although all are fitted with the latest UltraATA/100 drives and appropriately powerful graphics cards. The Systemax is based on Intel's own desktop motherboard, naturally featuring Intel's 850 chipset and 800MHz Rambus memory. Rambus still costs a premium and this, along with Intel bundling 128Mb as standard with Pentium 4 chips, might explain why Systemax opted for 128Mb, when 256Mb would be more suited to this class.

You do, however, get a fairly good helping of optical drives and audio features. At the bottom of the stack is an Iomega Zip 650 CD-RW, which will write at a reasonable eight-speed. Sitting above it is a 16-speed Pioneer DVD-ROM, which will be great with the multimedia bundle.

The VideoLogic Sonic Fury (reviewed issue 72, p197) sound card has an S/PDIF output so it can drive the VideoLogic DigiTheatre 5.1 speaker system to its full capabilities, and qualifies as a complete PC home cinema setup. The powerful speakers reproduce detail and both low and high frequencies well at lower volume.

Several of the Pentium 4 machines we've seen have been fitted with 64Mb graphics cards, and the Dell Dimension 8100 (reviewed issue 75, p150) managed to squeeze in a 64Mb GeForce2 Ultra - although it actually costs slightly less than the Systemax, despite its similar specifications. The Systemax makes do with a rather less cutting-edge 32Mb board based on the GeForce2 GTS GPU, which is a decent enough card but not in the same league, which is clear when you compare the 3DMark2000 scores for each card. Running in 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour depth, the Systemax managed 4,083, while the Dell left it well behind with a blinding score of 6,125 in the 32-bit colour 1,024 x 768 test.

Interestingly, the same GTS chipset on a 32Mb card in the NEC Direction A+ 1.2GHz Athlon DDR system (reviewed issue 76, p133) scored 5,096, which shows a possible merit of the Athlon CPU over the Pentium 4.

The results of the graphics card's efforts are fed through to a 19in Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 91 monitor (reviewed issue 65, p170), which uses a Mitsubishi Diamondtron NF aperture-grille tube. The monitor has a decent 18in viewable diagonal, and it coped with 1,152 x 864 resolution well enough, but we noticed a slight lack of really crisp focus even in XGA mode, and this was sufficiently evident at 1,280 x 1,024 to convince us that 1,152 x 864 was the practical limit for this display.

While expansion might not be uppermost in the mind of someone who's just gone out and bought a system like this, it can come around quickly enough, so we had a look to see what could be done with the Lifestyle if needs be. Adding more memory will be easy thanks to a pair of RIMM slots, and there's a space above the 30Gb Maxtor hard disk if you manage to fill it up and need another one.

If you ever wanted to add any more drives, there's a choice between a 3.5in bay and a 5.25in bay, which should be fine for most of us. There are also two spare PCI slots if you can think of anything else to put in them. We should say here that the Lifestyle comes with a V.90 modem and indeed a 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet adaptor, although the latter seemed a bit out of place in a multimedia system like this.