IBuyPower Dream2004PC

IBuyPower's Dream 2004 PC looks like many other beige boxes that have passed through our lab before. But when you pop in a CD or DVD, red sound-activated lights on the center front panel and blue neon tubing on the inside blink on and off (a feature that could be fun or incredibly distracting, depending upon your circumstances). The blinking lights are visible thanks to the see-through panel on the side of the case.

The Dream 2004 gives you a number of ways to upgrade down the road, with six open drive bays (three internal for additional hard drives, and three externally accessible for removable or optical drives), two vacant memory sockets, and four available PCI slots. The side panel slides off after you undo two thumbscrews. Two of the six USB 2.0 ports are located on the front panel.

Equipped with a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 512MB of DDR400 memory, this Dream 2004 earned a 125 score on PC WorldBench 4, in line with what we'd expect from this inexpensive configuration. The system has a few nice features, including a roomy 120GB hard drive and a dual-format rewritable DVD drive.

The bundled 19-inch ViewSonic E90 CRT monitor produced good hues and colors on a test photo and a DVD movie, though colors were less vibrant than those we've seen on some other CRTs. Text quality was this monitor's Achilles' heel, though: Fonts were legible, but they were not sharp, even at large sizes. The unevenly focused letters appeared dark in some sections of the screen while lighter in others.

The 128MB NVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card with 128MB of memory can handle most basic imaging tasks, but its performance on our test games was lackluster. When we tested it at 1280 by 1024 resolution and 32-bit color depth on Unreal Tournament, frame rates dipped to around 20 frames per second; one of the slowest rates we've seen in a system that can run at this resolution.

The Creative SBS .41 450 speaker set (four small satellites and a subwoofer) generated loud sound in our audio tests with a DVD soundtrack and vocal music. But at high volumes, trebles sounded brassy and distorted. Bass notes were marginally better, but they didn't deliver the oomph and presence that more expensive speakers systems offer.

Our review unit had neither a user's guide nor a setup poster. The company does include some individual component manuals, however, such as those for the motherboard and the monitor, so you have some information specific to the system's components.

Upshot: The Dream 2004 is an interesting-looking, well-featured, and nicely priced system, but you may need to invest a few more bucks to make it a good gaming machine.

Mick Lockey