Polywell Poly X5800i

There's room for only two additional 5.25-inch devices in the Poly X5800i. That's because one slot is taken up by a proprietary hard drive bay that you can eject and lock from the outside of the chassis. We suppose this is to prevent anyone from stealing your secondary drive, but to us, it feels like a gimmicky, unnecessary addition to the case. What's more, there's no room for this drive elsewhere. Space is tight, but you can cram one more hard drive into the case's rail-based drive bays. That's it.

We do love the X5800i's connectivity options. Eight USB ports on the motherboard sit alongside a single FireWire 400 port and two eSATA ports. You also get the (seemingly standard) 5.1-channel onboard audio, one gigabit ethernet port, and an optical S/PDIF connection. The case's bare-bones front has a scant two USB ports, but the X5800i swaps out the typical front-panel Firewire 400 port for an eSATA port instead. And the included media card reader is enough to quell our distempers.

the X5800i's $3399 price isn't very low (as of December 3^, 2008; $400 extra to have a 24-inch Acer AL2416WB wide-screen display included), making us all the more upset that Polywell cut corners on its keyboard-and-mouse combo. The crummy, generic Logitech mouse is as standard as a two-button mouse comes. Boring. The included Logitech Y-SV39 keyboard at least comes with function buttons for launching your e-mail, Web browser, and the like, but it's pretty drab--and ugly.

Polywell's X5800i is a sporting rig, but the internal design issues we've mentioned really do hold it back.

--David Murphy