3Dlabs Awesome 6300

The Awesome 6300 we looked at has what is now a fairly typical configuration for a power system, with two optical drives and dual 120GB hard drives set up in a high-performance RAID configuration that lets you access both as one 240GB volume. You also get plenty of high-speed ports, with two USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port on the front panel and an additional FireWire and four USB 2.0 ports on the case back. The front panel also has headphone and microphone jacks. It's useful to have a variety of ports on the front panel, but ABS missed an opportunity by not placing them higher on the case, where they'd be far easier to access. One unusual addition to the system we received was a PCI-based 802.11g D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G 2.4-GHz wireless adapter, which could come in handy if you have a wireless-ready notebook (and a router). An 802.11g adapter is designed for speeds of up to 108 megabits per second and ranges of over 300 feet indoors.

ABS bundled Samsung's SyncMaster 191T 19-inch LCD display and ATI's 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card with its system. At just over $600, this LCD is relatively inexpensive for its size (all our system prices include the listed monitor), and it's a former Best Buy on our Top 10 Monitors chart. Image quality was outstanding: Small fonts in our test text screens had fine, sharp edges. Colors looked terrific, too--with bright, accurate hues in a DVD movie and in a test photo. The slim panel pivots into portrait mode for viewing Web pages, legal documents, or photos.

The Awesome 6300 graphics performance is everything you'd expect in a system with this level of horsepower. Only the Alienware Aurora Extreme matched the ABS's frame rates in our high-end gaming tests.

Logitech's superlative THX Z-680 5.1 speaker set and Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card provided the Awesome 6300 with great sound, delivering rumbling bass notes during DVD playback and clean-sounding treble on vocal tracks. Our only sound-related gripe is that the sound card connectors weren't color coded, so even with helpful documentation, setting them up the speakers didn't go as smoothly as with other high-end sets. The media reader is an external model, which is a nice add-on, but it's not nearly as convenient as an internal model.

As well-equipped as the 6300 is, it's still nicely amenable to upgrades. The side panel pops off easily, and the neat, uncluttered interior uses the newer round data cables instead of the old-fashioned, wide-ribbon cables. Our unit had seven open drive bays (four internal for hard drives, and three externally accessible that can take removable or optical drives), more than you'll probably ever need.

Upshot: An inexpensive Athlon FX-51-powered system, the Awesome 6300 is an enticing package for cutting-edge power users and gamers.

Mick Lockey