Compaq's Muscular X Gaming PC
Photograph: Kevin CandlandMedia Center 2005 has a lot going for it, but it's not optimized for gaming. If you're looking for an entertainment machine of a different sort, X could mark the spot. Compaq's X Gaming PC GX5000Z is a brushed-aluminum tower that has performance and attitude to spare. You might not think first of Compaq when looking for a gaming PC, but I was very impressed with this computer. It just may change some people's attitudes about which machines are legitimately hot. The X is a high-end gamer: This system costs $5429 with a fine 23-inch LCD monitor.
Stocked with a 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 FX-53 processor, 1GB of RAM, an NVidia GeForce 6800 graphics card, 256MB of graphics memory, and Windows XP Professional, our test system turned in a blazing WorldBench 5 score of 97, one of the highest of any desktop PC we've tested. The X really shone on our gaming benchmarks--it ranks among the top five performers we've tested in the past eight months.
This big tower has intimidating heavy-metal looks, including a glowing rear fan. The sculptured front features a vault-like door that swings up to reveal the drive bays (a DVD burner came with our unit) and a seven-in-one memory card reader.
A headphone port on the front would have been nice, but there are many things to like about the design, such as the six open drive bays, the tool-less case access, the removable motherboard tray, and the graphics card, which has two DVI ports for dual monitors.
For our review, HP sent its 23-inch F2304 LCD, which in addition to analog and DVI ports has an S-Video-in port. The picture over DVI is impressive, but serious gamers will want to bypass the built-in speakers in favor of a multichannel speaker system to stay alive in surround-sound-capable first-person shooters.
Contributing Editor Carla Thornton covers laptops and other topics for PC World.
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