Product Reviews

The Decimator is another amusing attempt by a normally respectable PC manufacturer to create something that sounds more like a weapon of mass destruction than a PC. In this case, however, we can assure you that it does exist, nestling menacingly in the corner of our Labs. Fortunately, despite its macho bravado the Decimator will not provoke an international incident, although you may need to own an oil field or two to afford one.

The Decimator's attractive case makes an immediate impact. An aluminium front door hides all those unsightly optical drives, and a flip-up panel on top of the case conceals extra USB, FireWire and headphone ports. The side panel has a large grille through which you can see one of two fans, both of which are covered in blue LEDs for added impact.

All five system fans are connected to an LCD display, which lets

A Pentium 4 570 running at 3.8GHz is paired with 1GB of RAM. This is further enhanced by a pair of 250GB SATA hard disks in a RAID 0 (striping) array, which provides lightning fast disk access times and 500GB of storage. This adds up to some incredible benchmark results, including a very high Shopper application benchmark score of 137.

Its 3D performance was great in our tests. It scored 71fps in Doom 3, and when we maxed out the settings and resolution we reduced that to 50.2fps, which is still more than sufficient. PCs with nVidia SLI graphics have proved faster, but this is unnecessary given that monitor resolutions are usually limited to 1,280x1,024.

Peripherals are of high quality, including a remote for controlling the installed XP Media Center. The lack of a TV card is a bit puzzling, but the streamlined Media Center interface is welcome.

The Decimator has loads of power and great components and will serve you well for a long time. That said, it's hard to recommend wholeheartedly to anyone but hardcore gamers or those who need a lot of processing and storage space for large tasks such as video editing or world domination.