NEC PowerMate i-Select XL3 A1400 review

Having stunned us with its £4,834 mega system in last month's PC Pro Labs (see Labs, issue 82, p74), NEC is back with something more affordable. Admittedly, at £1,899, the PowerMate i-Select XL3 A1400's not that affordable, but then it's still a high-spec, feature-packed bundle, with most of the good stuff from last month's Ultimate PC contender, and even a few improvements.

The biggest improvement has to be the 1.4GHz Athlon CPU. This might only be 67MHz faster than 1.33GHz, but until we see the Palomino architecture hit the desktop it's as speedy as we're likely to get. Having got hold of the latest processor, NEC has followed the current trends of high-spec systems: first, get hold of a motherboard, like the GigaByte GA-7DX, that uses the AMD 761 chipset. Second, find 256Mb of PC2100 DDR SDRAM. Next, plug in a 7,200rpm hard disk, like the 60Gb Maxtor Diamond Plus. Finally, cough up for a GeForce3 graphics card.

In 3D the PowerMate simply flies. We ran our usual tests - 3DMark2000 and 3DMark2001, both at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour. In 3DMark2000 the PowerMate scored an impressive 8,771, and even when faced with the challenge of 3DMark2001 it managed a fine 5,426.

The score in our 2D benchmarks was equally impressive. While last month's Evesham Axis 1400 (see Reviews, issue 82, p144) scored a higher 4.75, you shouldn't be concerned. If there's a mainstream application on the planet that the PowerMate would struggle with, we'd be incredibly surprised.

NEC hasn't spared any expense on raw speed, and it's gone even further in terms of peripherals and features. Take a look at the monitor, for instance. While you don't get the 20.1in flat panel of last month's Labs system, you still get a 22in Diamondtron NF display. The NEC MultiSync FE1250+ isn't perfect, suffering from a small corner-focus problem in the bottom left-hand corner, but the clarity and brightness of the on-screen image is generally very good, and you can run the monitor at 1,600 x 1,280 at a flicker-free 85Hz refresh rate.

The sound system would be my one area of concern. There's nothing wrong with the Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1 (see Labs, issue 82, p131), but the Labtec speakers aren't amazing. It's not that this twin satellite and desktop subwoofer setup lacks power, rather it lacks subtlety. Don't think of a £1,000 hi-fi system playing a Bach concerto; think of a 17-year-old kid playing speed garage from his car with the volume up and every window rolled down.

But who cares about that when you see the other treats that NEC has in store? First and foremost, there's a Pioneer DVR-103 DVD-RW. There's not much this little darling can't do, as it reads and writes CD, DVD, DVD-R for General and DVD-RW discs. There's still a standards battle brewing in the recordable DVD stakes, but for now DVD-RW seems like a safe bet. You can read the discs in most DVD drives, all DVD-R and DVD-RW drives and, so we're told, most drives conforming to the rival DVD+RW format.

NEC also knows that some people want to copy directly from one optical drive to another. As a result, the PowerMate comes fitted with a 16-speed Pioneer DVD-ROM drive. In order to facilitate that, and anything else you might want to do with DVD-RW, you also get Prassi's PrimoDVD 1.5 DVD and CD mastering software. Also, DVD video playback comes courtesy of MGI SoftDVD Max 5.

And even that's not all. NEC has also bundled a Logitech QuickCam USB Webcam, plus the Hauppauge WinTV USB TV tuner and capture device. With this last item you can watch TV and flick through teletext, or capture still and video images from your TV aerial or VCR. Is there nothing that the PowerMate won't do in the name of entertainment?