Polywell Polywell Poly 580CF-2900

The 580CF-2900 received a score of just 93 on WorldBench 6 Beta 2 tests, a result roughly 26 percent behind the average mark of 126 that rival systems in our gaming-PCs chart achieved. The dual HD 2900 XT graphics boards also struggled, achieving 130 frames per second in Doom 3 at 1280 by 1024 resolution with antialiasing turned on, and 140 fps in Far Cry at the same settings. Of the models in our gaming-PCs chart, the best performer on the same Doom 3 test was the Alienware Area-51 7500, which was equipped with dual 768MB EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics boards. It achieved 165 frames per second, versus the rest of the gaming-PC field's average of 143 fps. The Dell XPS 720's 768MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX board helped it lead the way in our GPU- and CPU-intensive Far Cry game script, which we run at 1280 by 1024 with antialiasing turned on; here the Dell averaged 202 fps, easily besting the Alienware and the Gateway FX530XT, which tied at 181 fps.

Though the 580CF-2900's midsize-tower case resembles that of an Alienware system, it isn't the same quality. For instance, the latch on the door covering the front drive bays is flimsy--we accidentally broke it off. Inside, the cables are adequately tied, but they're bundled such that it's hard to install anything into the three available 5.25-inch bays or the single free 3.5-inch bay. All of the case's hard-disk bays were occupied on our test system, as it had two 74GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital hard disks and one 500GB, 7200-rpm Seagate hard disk (for a total capacity of 648MB).