Product Reviews

You could spend a small fortune on a PC if you were determined to buy only the latest technology, but £1,200 is about the right amount to spend if you want high-end performance and features without expense. So we were interested in putting Cube 24/7's Lynx through its paces.

The Lynx tore through our applications benchmarks, especially our video-encoding and multitasking tests, which benefit from the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor. Its video-editing capabilities are further helped by a FireWire port, for connecting digital video cameras, and the huge 500GB of storage for your video clips.

This 500GB is provided by two hard disks in a RAID 0 (striping) array, but you could choose to reconfigure and use RAID 1 (mirroring). In this configuration, you'd get just 250GB of storage, but should either disk fail your data would be safe.

The Lynx can play recent 3D games well, as our Doom 3 test shows. But while Call of Duty 2 was playable on the Radeon X1800XL graphics

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card, you'll have to lower the resolution or turn off anti-aliasing to get a smoother experience. You'll probably have to upgrade the graphics card in a year's time if you want to continue playing titles at the highest resolutions. This doesn't have to be expensive, as the Lynx uses a CrossFire motherboard so you can add another X1800XL card at a later date.

We were disappointed with the GNR 19" monitor. It struggled in our colour and greyscale gradient tests, showing significant banding. While passable for games and watching DVDs, it isn't suitable for image editing. The cheap-feeling base is also difficult to tilt and adjust.

You can add extra storage using the two free 31/2" hard disk bays if the two 250GB hard disks aren't enough. There are plenty of USB2 ports, but the risers for six of the 10 rear USB2 ports block access to the PCI slots. They will have to be removed if you want to add a PCI card or another CrossFire graphics card.

The Creative P5800 5.1 surround sound speakers are fine for watching DVDs and playing games, but music lovers may be annoyed by the slight distortion at higher volumes. The three-year warranty doesn't provide onsite service, which could be inconvenient. The Lynx is also quite noisy, so if you plan on using it to write your next novel or record music, the din from the power supply and cooling fans will get irritating.

The Lynx is powerful in Windows, but is let down by its poor-quality monitor and limited expansion options. It is a decent gaming PC, but the Vantage X2 has better performance and costs less.