3Dlabs ABS Awesome 4500

With diminutive speakers and a small LCD, the ABS Awesome 4500 is appropriate for dorm rooms or tight offices. Our review machine's 2.6-GHz Intel Pentium 4 with 512MB of DDR400 memory earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 109. We haven't tested a system with this exact configuration before; but the HP Pavilion a350N, which is equipped with the same processor and DDR333 memory, earned marginally better 116. For increased memory headroom, you can pay $86 extra and get the Awesome 4500 configured with two 512MB 400DDR memory modules.

The Sony SDM-S53 B 15-inch LCD accompanying our test system displayed text and graphics well: Black text appeared sharp on a white background--even at small font sizes--and clothing details in a test photo were easy to recognize. Black icon descriptors are etched onto the black control buttons on the bezel, making the icons difficult to see. Moreover, to get to the auto-adjust setting, we had to dig several layers down in the on-screen menu. (Most other LCDs we see place a handy auto-adjust control on the outside bezel.)