Product Reviews

We always like to see PC vendors try something different, but Real Machines has gone one step too far with its RX1. The metallic green, blue and purple colour scheme is eye-catching, but it's also astonishingly expensive. It's the same paint that TVR uses on its sports cars and costs £500 a litre.

The Asetek XE Vaporchill case is also staggeringly costly, although the vapour chilling it offers means that the Pentium 4 560 processor can be overclocked to 4GHz. Backed up by 1GB of Corsair XS DDR2 RAM, it's a powerful specification.

Meanwhile, the Northbridge and X800 XT graphics card are both water-cooled. This means that the graphics card also comes overclocked. On paper, it's the fastest PC we've seen. This was reflected in our benchmark results, where PCMark04 returned the fastest score we've ever recorded with 6,140 and the Shopper application benchmarks were equally impressive at 161.

As you might expect, graphics performance

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is also fabulous and the Eizo 20.1" LCD is the perfect companion to the graphics card. It has an excellent picture via its digital input, an adjustable stand and has also been painted to match the case.

You needn't worry about hard disk performance either. The two Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives in an RAID 0 (striping) array provide 148GB of fast data storage and are among the fastest drives on the market. There's also a 200GB hard disk for data storage.

A wired keyboard and mouse round off the bundle. As with the other components, these have been painted to match. Of course, replacing one of these is going to be expensive thanks to the ludicrous cost of the paint.

While there's the usual range of ports at the rear of the case, including seven USB2, two Gigabit LAN and three FireWire, the front of the case has none. This means delving round the back of the case every time you want to connect a peripheral.

You can expect build quality to be very high as each PC is assembled by a single technician who ensures that it's all working. Once built, the PC is delivered by a company driver who'll even un-box it and plug it in. Great - since it's hugely heavy.

There's no doubting the calibre of this PC. It's the fastest we've seen - a stunning performer. However, £4,111 is really an enormous amount of money to spend on a PC. If style and performance are that important to you, you'll be ecstatic with it. Otherwise, you can buy a PC with 80 per cent of the performance for under half the cost.