Product Reviews

Cube's Lynx ST2 PC has been designed to offer a bit of everything to everyone: it's a gaming PC with a fast processor and plenty of storage. In fact, it has four 250GB hard disks providing 1TB of storage. Cube 247 ships the PC using a RAID 0 (striping) array, but this means that if any of the disks fail, you'll lose your data.

You can use Nvidia's MediaShield utility to choose RAID 1 mirroring if you'd rather make sure that your data remains protected (see Upgrade Workshop next month for more about RAID). With all this storage, it's a shame there's no memory card reader to make it easier to put digital photos on the PC.

The dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor tore through our benchmarks, especially our video-encoding test. Combined with its generous storage capacity and three FireWire ports, the ST2 is a more-than-capable video-editing PC, although no video-editing software

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is included.

The 4200+ processor plugs into an AM2 socket on the motherboard. This is a good choice, as it means that the Lynx ST2 uses DDR2 memory and, as AMD will make all its new processors AM2-compatible, it should be easier to upgrade to a faster processor in the future.

The motherboard has just a single slot, so you can use only a single graphics card. Even so, most of today's games are playable on the ST2 as our Doom 3 test shows. The ATI Radeon X1800XL graphics card had more trouble with our Call of Duty 2 test, so you'll have to turn down the detail settings or switch to a lower resolution if you want to play newer and more demanding games.

The ST2 has a staggering 14 USB2 ports in total. While some of these ports are on risers blocking off the two PCI slots and one of the PCI-E x1 slots, most people are likely to find the USB2 ports more useful and the risers can be removed if necessary.

The 19" GNR monitor is more than suitable for playing games and watching movies but the banding in our greyscale test and the poor viewing angles make it unsuitable for work where colour accuracy is important. The booming Creative 5.1 surround-sound speakers will please film buffs.

With a fast Athlon 64 X2 processor and plenty of storage space, the Lynx ST2 is an impressive PC, particularly for games. But for a similar price, PC Nextday's Zoostorm 7-7401 Downloader PC has similar performance and even larger hard disks as well as a TV tuner and WiFi.