Product Reviews

Packard Bell's iPower SLI might not be very exciting to look at, with its dull midi tower case and office-white CRT monitor, but look inside and a monster is revealed.

At the heart of the iPower SLI lies an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor running at a speedy 2.6GHz. Paired with two 1GB sticks of RAM in dual-channel mode, this is a formidable core specification that unsurprisingly breezed through every one of our tests. Two 400GB hard disks sit in a RAID 0 array to provide 800GB of fast storage, while a double-layer DVD+/-RW and separate DVD-ROM cover optical media.

This is a PCI Express system thanks to the nVidia nForce4 chipset. The Asus motherboard employs the Scalable Link Interface (SLI) version of this chipset and allows two graphics cards to be fitted in adjacent PCI Express x16 slots. The two cards communicate directly through a bridge connector and

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load-balance any graphics processing, so each card does 50 per cent of the work.

Packard Bell has fitted a pair of 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800GT graphics cards that make for simply staggering 3D performance. While its standard-resolution Doom 3 and 3DMark03 scores are stunning, it's only when the resolution is upped that you really get the benefit from this system; at a resolution of 1,600x1,200, the iPower SLI achieved over 65fps in Doom 3.

To make the most of this high resolution, Packard Bell provides a 19" CRT monitor, which has better response times than LCD equivalents. It's rather a surprise that Packard Bell opted for an office-white 19" curved-screen CRT, though. Colours are great and the picture is sharp, but we would expect at least a flat-screen CRT with this system, even if it put an extra £100 on the overall price. If you're spending over £2,000 on a system, it should be near perfect in every department.

The stereo speakers are also inadequate, but easy to upgrade. The iPower SLI is capable of 7.1 surround-sound output, so there is plenty of scope for improvement.

With the fastest processor available, 2GB of RAM and 800GB of fast access storage, this is a monster of a computer. The price, although substantial, is reasonable for such a high-specification system. If you can live with - or find an alternative to - the sub-standard monitor and can afford a little extra for some speakers, you won't be disappointed.