Polywell Poly900VF

Outfitted with a 2-GHz Athlon 64 3200+ and 512MB of DDR400 memory, the Poly 900VF netted a 136 score on our PC WorldBench 4 tests, only a few points below the marks of the top performers equipped with this 64-bit processor.

Housed in a full-tower chassis, the 900VF has plenty of room for upgrades: Seven drive bays (four internal and three externally accessible) provide more room than most users will ever need. In our review system, three of the bays were occupied by the 900VF's roomy 80GB hard drive and two optical drives (a 16X DVD-ROM drive and a 52X/24X/52X CD-RW drive).

Our review unit's NVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card with 128MB of memory performed well in our graphics tests. The frame rates it produced in our test games weren't among the top scorers we've seen recently, but the card will do fine for most gamers. We did see some image glitches--lighting and texture problems, and an absence of colors on buildings--in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The latter is a driver-related problem we've encountered with the version of the GeForce FX 5200 drivers shipped with many systems: It can be corrected by updating the drivers to the latest ones from NVidia.

The bundled 17-inch CRT display, AOC's 7ELR, was middling in our tests, though it fared better with graphics than with text. Skin tones on a photo looked realistic; and a DVD movie and games sported bright (though not eye-popping) hues. The quality of the rendered text screens in our test was very disappointing: Letters looked fuzzy at all sizes, making this monitor an especially bad choice for people who engage in marathon word-processing or number-crunching sessions. The controls for adjusting lack an on-screen display menu, relying instead on several unlabeled icons that span the right bezel.

Polywell bundled our review unit with the three-piece (two satellites and subwoofer) Labtec Pulse 350 speaker set. It delivered muddied bass notes in a DVD movie and thin trebles on vocal tracks. The integrated sound system supports up to 6 channels, so you might consider upgrading to a full surround-sound system; Polywell offers the Creative SBS 5.1 560 for $60 more.

Polywell's documentation consists of a user's manual that explains general PC concepts but doesn't delve into the specifics of this model. Polywell doesn't offer manuals for the system components, either. The software includes a handful of gaming titles (among them, the now-ancient Duke Nukem Manhattan Project).

Upshot: The Poly 900VF's is a fast, attractively priced Athlon 64 system, but its disappointing monitor could put off some potential buyers.

Mick Lockey