Polywell Poly 865RF-3200

One interesting twist to our test system was its three hard drives. Two 40GB drives are set up in a RAID 0 striped configuration; the system also came with a secondary 120GB hard drive. That should be enough disk space for even the most avid digital videographer.

WHAT'S NOT: Powered by Intel's 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 CPU (with an 800-MHz frontside bus) and a gigabyte of dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM, the 865RF earned a surprisingly low score of 118 on PC WorldBench 4 tests. One of several systems we saw this month with this new Intel processor, its performance score was 7 percent lower than that of the similarly equipped MPC Millennia 920i Professional and Dell Dimension 8300. All three systems shipped with 1GB of DDR400 memory; the MPC and Dell came loaded with Windows XP Home, while the Polywell used Windows XP Professional (a difference that should have a minimal impact on performance).

The 19-inch AOC 9KLR monitor didn't perform well on text screens, displaying slightly fuzzy letters in test documents. On the upside, colors looked bright and skin tones realistic in our test photo. The monitor's tilt-and-swivel hinge felt a bit stiff.

WHAT ELSE: Our test configuration came encased in Polywell's usual silvery aluminum case. A whopping nine drive bays (six internal bays for hard drives; three externally accessible 5.25-inch bays for removable media drives) provides more expandability than you'll probably ever need (and to use it, you must install another IDE card). You can add extra memory in the two available DIMM slots, but only one PCI slot is empty. To connect devices, the Poly 865RF has four USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire 400 ports on the back; two more USB 2.0 ports, in addition to conveniently positioned headphone and microphone jacks, are on the case front.

Polywell's documentation includes a photocopied setup guide and a spiral-bound manual with a few detailed chapters on upgrading and troubleshooting. The information is somewhat generic and lacks specifics for this system.

UPSHOT: If you're looking for a gaming machine on the cheap, this Polywell should do an adequate job, but we've seen better performance by far, and better monitors, with other systems.