CompUSA PII-450

CompUSA PII-450

At $2499, CompUSA's latest midtower is a fairly good deal: It's $80 less than Dell's 450-MHz PC, which makes it one of the least expensive PII-450s on the chart. But the CompUSA system's comparatively sluggish WorldBench score of 203 puts it on par with the typical PII-400 machine--plenty of speed for most users, but not as fast as most PII-450 systems we've tested.

Still, the CompUSA system includes a few perks lacking in other similarly priced 450-MHz PCs. For instance, the machine comes with a 19-inch Royal Multiscan X-19 monitor that made pictures look sharp and bright. (If you buy Dell's Dimension XPS R450, you'd pay a $198 premium for a 19-inch monitor).

The CompUSA's ACS85 speaker ensemble produced rich, full sound across a big room. But if you're at all serious about DVD, you'll probably want to buy an aftermarket MPEG-2 decoder board. The SoftDVD player that comes with this PC had the same problem playing DVD MPEG-2 video as it did on other systems: Video playback was choppy from the start. When we tried to go online using the bundled modem (a PCI model from Aztech that makes heavy use of the CPU), Soft-DVD video playback screeched to a halt.

The documentation included with our test system was almost useless, consisting of a thin, badly diagrammed user manual plus a motherboard manual. Unfortunately, the poorly labeled ports and lack of coded cables may have less experienced PC users reaching for these manuals. And while telephone support technicians are available around the clock, we found the support quality acceptable at best. In anonymous calls we waited on hold for 8 minutes on average, and one of the three reps we spoke to was rude and gave us inaccurate information. For these reasons, we recommend this machine to savvy computer users only.

SUMMARY

PRO: Big and bright 19-inch monitor CON: Sketchy documentation; lack of MPEG-2 decoder card results in inferior DVD playback