Artwork: Rick Rizner, John Goddard

With an angular black case illuminated by a series of glowing lights, the Gamer FX would look at home on the set of a sci-fi film. Blue LED lights shone from the two case fans on our test system, and a cold-cathode light cast the interior components in a lurid blue glow (other colors are available). Even the RAM modules had lights: The LEDs on the two 512MB DDR400 Corsair XMS Pro DIMMs show memory activity.

Despite all that flash, up close the case looked cheap, with a shiny plastic surface that picked up my fingerprints. The cyberpunk look inside was somewhat marred by a large tangle of wires inelegantly tied up next to the optical drive. The 16X rewritable DVD drive included with our test system was connected by a flat, boring-looking IDE cable, which seems an odd choice considering that more-attractive rounded and UV-reactive cables are available. The case does provide plenty of expansion room--three internal and four externally accessible drive bays are vacant. A cover on the front of the case hides the externally accessible drive bays and a six-in-one memory card reader.

The system turned in impressive performance: Based around an Athlon 3500+ with 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM, the Gamer FX we reviewed earned a WorldBench 5 score of 98, making it the fastest value system on the chart. By comparison, the $999 CyberPower Gamer Ultra 7500 SE earned a WorldBench 5 score of 91 running on a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 3200+ with 512MB of DDR400 SDRAM.

IBuyPower supplied a ViewSonic VA712b LCD monitor with our test system, and it rendered sharp, clear text. However, the colors in photos and in our test DVD movie looked washed out and pale. In our lab tests, the system produced above-average frame rates on several popular games, but it was still some way off from the highest rates we've seen. Still, they were significantly higher than those achieved by the CyberPower Gamer Ultra 7500 SE, which came with an NVidia GeForce FX 5700LE graphics card with 256MB of DDR SDRAM. The Gamer FX included a Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D graphics card with 128MB of DDR3 SDRAM.

The Gamer FX is one of the first desktop systems we've looked at to come with both FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 (aka 1394b) ports. Although not many devices use the faster new FireWire 800 standard yet, it's nice to have the port available. The motherboard also supports up to eight audio channels, and the 7.1-channel Logitech X-530 speakers that came with our review system produced clear, bright sound. At $1395, the Gamer FX is certainly reasonably priced for all you get in return.

Upshot: The Gamer FX is a well-equipped, speedy system for gamers who want a bit of flash.

Richard Baguley