Multimedia PCs

This is one of our favourite times of the year. The staff at the RMIT IT Test Lab gets to play with the ultimate in multimedia PCs (OK, we love them because they're great for games!). Last year we looked at a range of PCs with 600MHz processors. This time around we are testing machines that come with 1.1GHz processors from AMD. The fastest Intel processor we tested was an Intel Pentium III 933. We also received an Apple Power Mac G4 with two 500MHz processors. All the PCs shipped with 128MB of RAM, 20GB or larger hard disk drives and 17 or 19in displays. We asked for all the PCs to have Windows 2000 Professional preinstalled but some came with Windows Millennium Edition.

Editors' Choice
AIT Celerity 1900 Series
Apple Power Mac G4
Compucon 2K Series
Creative Blaster PC
Editors' Choice: Deltacom Imprese Games Edition
Editors' Choice: Dominator 1100 Series
Gateway Select 1100
Pioneer 2000 PowerPC AMD K7 1GB
QDI Targa Power-Line
Compaq Presario 7000 Series
The Claw
How We Tested

Editors' Choice

Overall: e@Pc Dominator-1100 Series
Budget: Alfa Deltacom Imprese Gamer's Edition
Merit: AIT Celerity 1900 Series

There were a couple of gaming machines that really stood out as true ultimate multimedia machines. The Australia IT and the e@Pc PCs found themselves in one heck of a dog fight. In many cases, we found one was faster at one task but slower in another. It was difficult to select a clear winner out of these two.

The Australia IT PC featured an Intel PIII 933 which we must salute for matching performance with the faster 1.1GHz Athlon processors. The Australia IT PC comes with a network card and modem (unlike the e@Pc entry). It also featured an Asus V7700 Deluxe graphics card that has some very nice features built in. The Australia IT PC is also $354 cheaper than the e@Pc machine.

All things considered, however, we came to the conclusion that you'd be better off spending an extra $354 for the e@Pc machine. It has a nicer monitor, a better set of speakers, and a second 30GB hard drive. The case was beautiful and of the highest standard we have seen. The e@Pc machine also ships with a Natural Pro Keyboard and IntelliMouse.

The Australia IT PC, though, certainly deserves a Merit Award. This year, we also decided on a Budget Ultimate Multimedia PC Award. In this category, there was one clear winner. The Alfa PC, for only $3,080, comes with a fast Intel PIII 866 CPU and a load of goodies to give those on a tight budget a chance at all the fun.

AIT Celerity 1900 Series

Price: $3845.
Company: Australia IT.
Ph: 03 9882 1811, Fax: 03 9882 0695
www.australiait.com.au

Australia IT has never submitted an Ultimate Games Machine for review before. After this review we hope they will come back and continue to put together a machine just as good as this one. The AIT machine has an Intel Pentium III processor that runs at 933MHz. It's the fastest of all the Intel-based machines and it was also the fastest overall machine along with the e@Pc machine. The AIT and e@Pc entries went neck and neck in most of the tests. The AIT machine seemed to do a bit better in Open GL and the e@Pc went somewhat faster in Direct 3D. The AIT PC managed 123 frames per second in Quake 2 and an amazing 137 frames in MDK. It was second fastest behind the e@Pc machine in Tirtanium OpenGL and Direct 3D. In fact, the AIT and e@Pc machines were streets ahead of the other games machines in Tirtanium. The AIT PC slowed right down compared to all the other machines once we changed the colour depth in MDK from 16 bit to 32 bit. AIT used an Asus V7700 Deluxe graphics card, which also uses the nVidia Geforce 2 GTS graphics engine. It also didn't do too well in WinBench 2D Business and High-End graphics compared to the other nVidia Geforce 2 GTS-based graphics cards. The Asus V7700 Deluxe has a number of features that you will not find on any of the other graphics cards. The Asus V7700 Deluxe was the only card to have S-video in and out as well as composite out and VR out, so you can plug in some 3D glasses (supplied).

The AIT case looks very plain and does not offer many drive bays. There are only two external 5.25in drive bays and one integrated 3.5in drive bay. Inside there is provision for another 5.25in drive bay and two 3.5in bays--the inside looked very congested (only because the power supply was mounted vertically). The power supply hides the CPU but it is possible to slide it out simply by removing two screws from the back of the case. This also makes it easier to get to the RAM. There are three DIMM slots that can accommodate up to 1.5GB or RAM (assuming 512MB modules are used).

The Asus motherboard uses the Intel 815 chipset and can run at bus speeds of up to 200MHz. Someone who loves to tweak and over clock their systems will love this motherboard. The AIT machine also shipped with the IBM Deskstar hard drive as well as the Sound Blaster Live card like many of the other machines.

The AIT machine also comes with a 56k PCI LT Win modem and a Realtek network card. It also has two communication and network riser slots as well as a three-port USB CNR card. There are also two built-in USB ports and an extra serial port.

The monitor included with the system is a Starview DE-770FA. The monitor provided some very good images, but it wasn't quite up to the standards of a Sony or Gateway monitor. We were quite familiar with the speaker system that came with the AIT machine. The Altec Lansing ACS54 has four 5W satellites and a 20W subwoofer. The speakers are good for gaming and represent good value. There's also a small software bundle that comes with the AIT PC, which includes Ulead Video Studio, Soldier of Fortune, Asus DVD, and Windows Me.

Apple Power Mac G4

Price: $7495.
Company: Apple Computer Australia.
Ph: 13 36 22, Fax: 02 9641 8160
www.apple.com.au

Apple has not been in many of our past reviews due to the fact that we have found it hard to source benchmark software that will run on a PC and on an Apple Mac. Apple Computer Australia provided both Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. We used these two games to compare the performance of the Apple Mac to the other PCs.

The new 500MHz dual processor Apple Power Mac G4 delivers up to twice the performance of previous G4 models. The Apple Power Mac is designed to perform best at processor-intensive tasks. The Apple Power Mac has always been somewhat faster than a PC at rendering large images and resizing images, for example. The Apple Power Mac is DV ready. Two 400Mbps Fire Wire ports let you plug DV cameras directly to your Mac. This is why the Apple Power Mac has been the more obvious choice for graphic designers and video editing professionals.

The design of the Apple Power Mac made it stand out from the crowd. It looks like no other computer. The case has smooth edges and has nice and big grab handles that make it easy for you to move it from one place to another. The right-hand side of the case opens up by pulling down on a lever. This will reveal the insides of the Power Mac. What we love about the Power Mac is how easy it is to get your fingers around all the internal hardware. All the cables were nicely routed and all the internal components can be upgraded or replaced quite easily.

Inside the Power Mac was a huge 40.9GB IBM Deskstar hard disk drive. A majority of the vendors supplied IBM hard drives but they were only 30.7GB drives. The IBM hard drive also has an Ultra ATA/66 interface. Some of the other smaller IBM hard drives had Ultra ATA/100 interfaces. The IBM hard drive is fast and is very quiet. The Apple Power Mac was the only machine to ship with a Liquid Crystal Display. The Apple Studio Display LCD is very elegant to say the least, but after playing some games, we felt that it probably should not be used as a games display. The Studio Display was not as sharp as some of the other CRT monitors. The contrast and brightness was very good but we preferred the CRTs.

The Apple Power Mac shipped with two Harmon Kardon Sound Speakers and a Harmon Kardon iSub Subwoofer. You will find high-end Harmon Kardon sound equipment in recording studios, cinemas and even expensive cars. The Harmon Kardon speakers that shipped with the Apple Power Mac look like something out of a science fiction movie. You can see through to the insides of each of the speakers and the subwoofer. This looks quite good and the sound quality was just as impressive.

The Apple Power Mac performed quite badly in Quake III Arena. It only managed to get 24 frames per second and in Unreal Tournament it just managed to get over 20 frames per second. This was largely due to the slow graphics card that was supplied. The 16MB ATI Rage 128 Pro does not pack the punch of the competition. We know its not very fair to compare the ATI Rage Pro 128 with something like the Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 GTS graphics card, but if the Apple had shipped with a much faster ATI graphics accelerator, we would have had a fairer comparison.

Compucon 2K Series

Price: $4999.
Company: Compucon Computers.
Ph: 02 9417 7166, Fax: 02 9417 7329
www.compucon.com.au

The Compucon 2K Ultimate Games PC was an AMD-based machine. It had a 1.1GHz Athlon processor, 128MB of SDRAM and a 64MB Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 GTS graphics card. The Compucon should have performed just as well as the other 1.1GHz Athlon machines, but in fact it was slower by more than 50 percent in some of the tests. All the obvious tweak settings on the graphics card seemed OK and all the BIOS settings, as far as we delved, were fine. We even uninstalled and reinstalled the Leadtek Winfast drivers and downloaded the new nVidia Detonator 3 drivers but we still could not get a performance increase out of the Compucon. (We should note that we only looked to see if any of the graphics cards had been unfairly tweaked or overclocked, and if they were we set them back to their default settings.) Everything else is left entirely to the vendor. That means it's up to the vendor to source the latest graphics and detonator drivers for their graphics card. If we had more time we would have investigated the problem with the graphics card a little further.

The Compucon has a great case that does not use any screws. The top lid slides out from the back of the case. There was a grab handle for both the right- and left-hand panel. The grab handle pulls out and up to remove the side panel. The Compucon shipped with 256MB of SDRAM. We had to remove the extra 128MB of RAM to make it fair for all the other Games Machines. What caught our eye almost instantly was the tall bronze cylindrical heat sink. There was also quite a large fan inside the cylinder and an even bigger exhaust fan located on the back of the case to extract the hot air.

The MSI 6340 motherboard does not offer much in the way of expansion. It can only support three PCI cards. There's also only two DIMM slots but it can still support up to 1GB of RAM (using 512MB memory modules). The MSI motherboard also ships with an integrated hardware sound blaster as well as one communication network riser slot.

The monitor was a 19in Compucon 998A. It was the second of the two 19in monitors we received and it had a slightly larger viewable area then the Targa monitor. The base of the monitor had a pair of speakers built into the base. It made the monitor sit a little higher compared to the other monitors. The image quality was good and all the colours were vivid. But the Compucon was not up to the standard of either the Sony or Gateway monitors. The Compucon PC also shipped with a pair of Logitech Soundman G1 speakers and a Rock Excel subwoofer. The subwoofer provided some decent thumps but the other speakers sounded a little thin. The Compucon also came with a larger-than-most hard disk drive, a Sound Blaster Live card, and a Logitek Wingman Gamepad. The Compucon PC is priced a little high compared to most of the other games machines but it's the least expensive of the 1.1GHz Athlon machines.

Creative Blaster PC

Price: $4599.
Company: Creative Labs.
Ph: 02 9666 6100, Fax: 02 9666 6900
www.australia.creative.com

This is the first time Creative has sent to the RMIT IT Test Lab an Ultimate Multimedia PC. The Creative PC sports an all-black look. Not only the case, but the monitor as well as speakers, keyboard and mouse are also black. The Creative PC was quite under powered compared to many of the other machines. It only had an Intel Pentium 800 processor. The Creative also shipped with the Creative 3D Blaster GeForce 2 GTS graphics card. This whole machine was made up of Creative components. The only thing that was not by Creative was the Seagate hard drive.

On the front of the case is a slide shutter. It opens up to reveal all the audio connectors as well as games and USB ports. Behind the all the connectors were two daughterboards. One of the daughterboards was connected to the Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum card. The front drive panel provides convenient connectivity to Optical out, S/PDIF in, S/PDIF out, MIDI in, and MIDI out. The other daughterboard was also connected to the Platinum card as well as the motherboard. From the Platinum card there was a line in (mic in), and headphone out connector and from the motherboard there was one games port and two USB ports. It does look a little messy inside the Creative system box. On the back of the Platinum was an additional S/PDIF out connector, a 9-pin Digital DIN connector (for Desktop Theater Series speakers), line in and line out jacks, as well as USB downstream port. The USB downstream connector connects to the motherboard's USB port, which enables USB connectivity on the front panel of the PC.

The Creative PC also comes with a Creative Dxr3 Card. The Creative Dxr3 decoder board provides better image quality and provides better processing of colour video at high resolutions then would your AGP graphics card. The Dxr3 also uses 6-tap filtering and scaling techniques to virtually eliminate artifacts that may appear around quickly moving objects. In addition the Dxr3 board takes Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio and feeds it to the DeskTop Theater 5.1 DTT2500 digital speakers for theatre- like sound. The DTT2500 come with four speakers (front and rear), one centre and one subwoofer. The speakers are rated at 7W and the subwoofer at 21W. These speakers were the best all-round speakers we tested. The subwoofer was not, however, as tight as the Boston Acoustic subwoofer that had shipped with the Gateway PC.

The Creative was a middle-of-the-road performer but with a faster CPU, it would have definitely given the other faster machines a good scare. We had some problems in Unreal Tournament--the Creative PC could only manage 21 frames per second. We did notice a lot of disk caching while the benchmark was running. The frames were quite jerky and the Seagate hard drive was very noisy. Where the Creative wins out is sound and video. They make the gaming experience much more exciting than any of the other PCs.

The Creative iNFRA Remote is a credit card sized infrared remote control for the Blaster PC. The iNFRA Remote allows you to play multimedia files and discs from the remote control. The Creative also ships with a microphone and a huge bundle of software that includes Halflife, Need 4 Speed, Thief, Comptons Encyclopedia, Riven, National Geographic, Cakewalk Express Gold, and McAfee VirusScan.

Editors' Choice: Deltacom Imprese Games Edition

Price: $3080.
Company: Alfa Computers.
Ph: 02 9317 3344, Fax: 02 9317 3859
www.alfa.com.au

The Alfa machine arrived at the eleventh hour--just in time to be able to be included in the full review. We were actually quite glad Alfa submitted the Deltacom Imprese Games Machine--it truly represents great value, and it was also very fast. For only a little over $3000 you get an Intel Pentium III 866 with 128MB of RAM, a Sony 17in monitor, and a 30GB hard disk drive and a 32MB Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 GTS graphics card. A Saitek 3D Cyborg joystick as well as a set of Altec Lansing ACS 45.1 speakers and modem rounds out this ultimate multimedia PC.

The case is nicely designed. It does not have any sharp edges and keeps away from the standard beige front by using a gray mask-like cover. There are three 5.25in drive bays and one 3.5in drive bay (there is also one integrated 3.5in drive bay). We found heaps of room inside the case--plenty room for an additional hard disk drive. Inside is an Intel 815EEA motherboard that has the 815 chipset. This motherboard had video on board as well as sound and it also has a built-in 10/100 LAN controller.

The Intel 815 chipset allows users to choose the integrated graphics or upgrade to the high-performance AGP graphics card with the ability to extend to a 4x data transfer. As mentioned before, the Alfa shipped with a Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 GTS graphics card. We saw the Alfa machine break 100 frames per second in Quake II and it managed to get the highest score in Unreal under Windows Me. In Quake 3 Arena it was shy of 100 frames and slightly slower than e@Pc and Gateway. The Alfa was the second fastest in MDK at 1024 x 768 x 32 and it was also the fastest in Tirtanium OpenGL under Windows Me.

The monitor supplied was a Sony CPDE200. It had a viewable area of 16in and a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200. Besides the image quality of the Gateway, the Sony flat-screen monitor was streets ahead of the rest. Alfa mentioned to us that you could also purchase a Fujitsu TE988G 19in monitor instead of the Sony CPDE200 17in monitor for the same price.

For storage, Alfa went for a Fujitsu 30GB hard drive. In WinBench Business Disk and High-End Disk the hard drive came dead last. The Fujitsu was also one of the few hard drives that was running at UDMA 100. The Alfa also shipped with a Pioneer 16x DVD drive--almost as popular with our test machines as the Sound Blaster Live card (five out of the nine machines we tested shipped with a Pioneer DVD drive). The three-speaker Altec Lansing ACS45.1 speaker system has a 20W subwoofer and two 6W satellites. They give a good thump but you would probably want at least a good four-speaker system when playing games so you can hear where all the sounds are coming from. These speakers have also been recently replaced by the new ACS45.2 speaker system. About the only thing missing from this great Alfa machine was a games bundle.

Editors' Choice: Dominator 1100 Series

Price: $4199.
Company: e@Pc.
Ph: 1300 65 62 65, Fax: 03 9818 5122
www.e-pc.com.au

The e@Pc machine was striking from the moment we took it out of its box to when we were running the games tests. The PC features an aluminium midi tower case--the first of its kind that we have seen. The case is very attractive and could probably pass as a kitchen appliance in some homes. The case has three 8 x 8cm cooling fans, two of which are located at the front of the case and one at the back. There are also some small holes on the front and back of the case to help keep the interior nice and cool. The case had four 5.25in drive bays and three 3.5in bays. There are also three 3.5in drive bays that are mounted to the bottom of the case.

The bottom three 3.5in drive bays hold two 30GB IBM Deskstar hard disk drives (the vacant 3.5in drive bay is between the two hard drives to keep the drives from getting too hot). The two 8 x 8cm cooling fans are located at the front of the case. These two fans provide excellent cooling for both of the IBM drives. e@Pc decided to do something different in that they connected their two hard drives to an Iwill SideRAID 100 Controller. e@Pc set the RAID controller to RAID 0 for both drives. This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance but no fault-tolerance. In WinBench Business Disk and High End Disk it blew the doors off all the competition. The RAID controller is also very easy to configure.

The e@Pc machine uses the same MSI motherboard Pioneer used in their machine. It has six PCI slots (two were used). One was occupied by the RAID controller and the other by the Sound Blaster Live card. The e@Pc also shipped with the same bronze cylindrical CPU heatsink we found in the Compucon. What also caught our eye was the number of heatsinks that were stuck on the Leadtek Winfast nVidia Geforce 2 GTS graphics card. The graphics card looked a little messy and was a fair bit heavier with all the heatsinks, but it's a good idea to keep your graphics card nice and cool. It will let you overclock the graphics card somewhat without damaging it (though please remember that you overclock at your own risk!).

The e@Pc machine swapped high scores with the Australia IT machine in many of the tests. It was fastest in Unreal and MDK at 32bit. It was also streets ahead of the rest in both Tirtanium OpenGL and Tirtanium Direct3D. The E@PC machine was always up there as one of the front running machines, and it was the only machine we tested under both Windows Me and Windows 2000 Professional. We thought it would be a good idea to see the performance differences under the two different operating systems. The Disk performance under Professional was far greater than in Me. Windows 2000 Professional is a true multi-threaded multitasking operating system and explains why it was faster in WinBench Business Disk and High End Disk. We ended up getting some mixed scores in some of the games tests. Windows Professional was faster in Quake II than Me and about the same in Quake III and Unreal Tournament. There was quite a big difference in Tirtanium. Windows 2000 Professional was, again, the faster of the two operating systems.

The e@Pc machine came with some Creative Cambridge FPS2000 Digital speakers. These speakers are new from Creative. The FPS2000 comes with four speakers (two each for front and rear), and one subwoofer. The speakers are all 7W and the subwoofer is rated at 25W. The speakers are designed for audio to home theatre enthusiasts as well as gamers. The e@Pc also shipped with a 17in Videocom DynaFlat monitor. The Videocom was one of the better 17in displays we tested. Also bundled was a Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard, a Microsoft IntelliMouse which doesn't use a trackball, and a games pack including Thief, Descent 3, Need for Speed 2, and Half Life.

Gateway Select 1100

Price: $5463.
Company: Gateway Australia.
Ph: 1300 30 29 52, Fax: 02 9966 5322
www.gateway.com.au

The Gateway Select 1100 was the most expensive in our roundup. It was also one of the most well featured machines. As its name suggests, the Select 1100 is a 1.1GHz AMD-based machine. The Gateway includes a Philips CDD4801/81CD-RW. The Philips drive is capable of reading CDs at 32x and capable of writing at 8x and rewrite at 4x. The Gateway also includes an NEC 12x DVD-drive, a 64MB nVidia Geforce 2 GTS card, a Sound Blaster Live card, and a 56k voice modem. The Gateway case is very attractive. It sports a grey front there was also a grey lid on top of the PC. We thought the lid on top of the case would have opened up and revealed something. It was, however, just a lid. Inside the Gateway were some very interesting locks that keep all the drives secured into place. There was a blue sliding lock for all the 5.25in and 3.5in drive bays. With this arrangement, screws are not needed to secure the two 5.25in drives as well as the one 3.5in drive. The locks slide left to unlock and right to lock a drive into place. Once unlocked, a drive can be easily removed by sliding the drive outwards.

The motherboard in the Gateway supports six PCI slots and three DIMM slots. The heatsink on the CPU was high and square. The back of the case sports a grille that helps keep the inside of the machine cool. On the back of the case we noticed a long pull-out handle. Not only does this make it easy to replace drives, but it enables the AGP and all the PCI cards to be pulled out without having to remove any screws. All the cards sat fairly firmly in their slots but they did not sit as firmly as they would if they were screwed in. Nonetheless, this arrangement will save you a little bit of time each time you come to replace any of the cards.

The Gateway PC had a Promise Ultra 100 IDE Controller card installed. The 30GB IBM Deskstar hard disk drive was connected to the Promise card. The disk performance of the IBM was as good as many of the other hard drives. The Gateway was one of the faster machines we tested. It was second only to the Australia IT machine in Quake III and in Unreal Tournament. The Gateway also managed the highest score in WinBench Business and High-End Graphics. We thought, however, the Gateway would have done a little bit better in MDK. It actually dropped a few more frames than the e@Pc machine when we switched the colour depth from 16 bit to 32 bit. Overall the 64MB nVidia Geforce 2 GTS graphics card did not make much of a difference in any of the games that we used to test all the machines. The Gateway shipped with Boston Acoustic BA7500 speakers. It has four sleek SST (Slimline Speaker Technology) panel speakers that are only one inch thick. The sound was excellent, and for playing games these speakers are exceptional. The bass is very tight and the speakers can be turned up very loud without affecting sound quality. These speakers also do an unbelievable job at playing anything from classical to heavy metal music. The Gateway monitor was a flat screen monitor that was also excellent. It was one of the best monitors, along with the Sony, that we tested.

Pioneer 2000 PowerPC AMD K7 1GB

Price: $3300.
Company: Pioneer Computers.
Ph: 02 9690 2888, Fax: 02 9690 0333
www.pioneercomputers.com.au

Pioneer Computers was one of the less expensive multimedia machines. The system's case can handle three 5.25in and two 3.5in drives and has heaps of interior space. The inside of the case is very tidy. All the long data and power cables are bundled and tied up out of the way. There were six PCI slots on the Micro Star International motherboard. Only two of these slots were used--one by the Sound Blaster Live Card and the other by a 56k voice modem. There were three DIMM slots and two 64MB-memory modules took up two of them. It was a little difficult to pull out and put back two of the memory modules--the clips that pull back to release the modules touch the AGP card. The motherboard is quite large but the space between the RAM banks and the AGP slot is small and you may feel like removing the AGP card before replacing any memory. The Front Side Bus (FSB) can be set almost anywhere from 100MHz to 167MHz. The MSI motherboard uses the Via KT133 chipset and at the heart is an AMD Athlon 1.0GHz processor.

The Creative 3D Blaster Geforce2 GTS graphics card was quite fast in Quake II. It managed to reach 80 frames per second. This was significantly faster than the QDI machine and just as fast as the Creative PC. However, the Pioneer PC performed a little better in all the Open GL tests compared to the Creative. But against the Australia IT PC, the Pioneer PC was considerably slower in all of the games tests. Even though the Pioneer had a 1GHz CPU, it still could not match the Intel-based PC. Fact is, that not many of the other AMD machines matched it with the 933MHz Australia IT games machine. Even up against the other AMD-based machines, the Pioneer again failed to keep up. The Pioneer was a little faster than the Compucon in some of the tests but we feel there was something wrong with the graphics card in the Compucon machine. In WinBench Business Disk and High-End Disk the Pioneer scored just as well as many of the other ATA/66 hard drives.

Pioneer also supplied the Creative Cambridge Soundworks FPS1000 speaker system. The satellites and subwoofer are finished in silver instead of beige. The Cambridge speakers are good all round speakers and sound quite well in games. They're really good for their price and they are a lot better then any of the generic speakers that were shipped with some of the other multimedia PCs. Each of the satellites are 3.5W and the subwoofer is 10W. The monitor is a Hitachi CM615. The display at 1024 x 760 was sharp and the colours were bright and vivid. The Hitachi was one of the better 17in monitors we tested and certainly is a nice addition to this good all round PC. There was no joystick with this PC and only there were only some graphics and sound drivers that shipped with the PC as well as the Windows 2000 Professional CD.

QDI Targa Power-Line

Price: $2830.
Company: QD Innovative Computer.
Ph: 03 9545 6233, Fax: 03 9545 6455
www.qditech.com.au

The QDI PC was shipped relatively late and just made it into our full review. The QDI Games Blaster was the least expensive games PC at only $2800. The PC is not full of frills but it still packs a decent punch and is affordable. The QDI comes with an Intel Pentium III 800 CPU. The QDI PC was the most under-powered PC along with the Creative PC. The Targa has three DIMM slots for a maximum of 768MB of SDRAM and five PCI and two ISA slots. The Targa was also the only motherboard in this review to support ISA cards. The system supports FSB (Front Side Bus) speeds of 66 to 150MHz and the clock multipliers can be set up to 8x.

The QDI did quite well in some of the games tests, especially Unreal Tournament. It measured up quite well against the more expensive machines. In other games tests, however, the Brilliant Game Blaster fell away quite dramatically from all the other games machines. One of the reasons is that it was driven by only an nVidia GeForce2 MX processor. Most of the other machines were driven by the new nVidia GeForce2 GTS graphics processor. Nonetheless, the GeForce 2MX based graphics card is not a bad graphics card. Though this PC is not as exciting as the e@Pc or Gateway PC , it is still fast.

It was the first time we had ever seen the Targa monitor. The Targa has a 19in display and at 1024 x 768 the image quality was sharp and the colours were quite vivid. We would, however, go for a high quality 17in monitor than a middle of the road 19in monitor. The QDI Brilliant Game Blaster was also the only PC besides the Apple Mac that did not include a Creative Sound Blaster Live Card. You can find sound on-board the QDI PC. The Juster 3D-804 MultiMedia Super Woofer System makes up the audio subsystem of the QDI PC. The sound quality was very average and not up to the standard we would expect for a multimedia machine. The subwoofer is a little weak and the satellites sound thin.

The QDI PC also comes with a Saitek Cyborg 3D Stick. We were quite impressed when we first saw this games controller this time last year. It still is an excellent gaming device. There's an eight-way hat switch and a swivel base and you can program up to 24 different actions. It is also fully adjustable so you can set the stick for left handed use.

The QDI PC shipped with a Seagate Barracuda hard disk drive. The Seagate performed quite well and was faster than some of the IBM hard disk drives. We found the drive to be a tiny bit too noisy and the same hard disk drive was also in the Creative PC. A 56k PCI modem as well as Windows 2000 Professional make up this pretty good bundle package.

Compaq Presario 7000 Series

Price: $4999.
Company: Compaq Australia.
Ph: 1300 368 369
www.compaq.com.au

The Compaq Presario reached the RMIT IT Test Lab at the last minute--far too late to be included in the full review. The system features an Intel Pentium III 933, 128MB of RAM and a 30GB hard disk drive. The Compaq, like the Gateway, comes with a Compaq DVD drive as well as a LG CD-RW drive. A nice addition was a Logitech Web Camera and a set of JBL speakers, which clip onto the side of the monitor.

The Compaq has a pop out cover, which is able to hold five compact discs. There's also another little latch to the right of the floppy drive that reveals two USB ports and a Firewire port. There were also two USB ports on the back of the case as well as an additional Firewire port. The Compaq shipped with Windows 98 SE, which again made it hard to compare results.

We managed to run Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. In Quake III the Compaq reached 22 frames per second. In Unreal Tournament the Compaq managed 33.96 frames per second which was quite impressive despite the Compaq only having a 16MB nVidia M64 graphics card.

The Compaq has some very nice features and we would've liked to take a closer look at it. It was a shame we didn't have enough time to run any further tests. The Compaq Presario also includes a Creative Sound Blaster PCI 128 sound card and a 56K Data Fax PCI modem.

The Claw

By Mark Snell
Price: $99.
Company: Ferraro Design.
Ph: 03 9813 8210, Fax: 03 9923 6064
www.claw.com.au

The Claw is an excellent aid for playing First Person Shooters (FPS). In the words of the designer, "Deadly moves have never been this easy". The Claw is shaped to fit the palm of your left hand and nine buttons arranged at your fingertips allow you to activate all moves that you used to have to go back to the keybaord for. The buttons are arranged as follows: Thumb: four buttons in a square, Index: two buttons side by side, middle, ring, and little fingers: one button each.

We were forced to spend most of a day playing Thief to test this out, and we found it to be excellent.The Claw plugs into your PS2 or AT keyboard port and passes transparently though to your existing keyboard. It works by capturing (in program mode) the keystroke(s) (up to five per key) you type into its own flash ram. Then when you hit that button it sends the keystroke(s) like you had pressed them at the keyboard.

Our current configuration:

• Thumb: Walk, Fast Walk, Walk Backward, and Drink Health
  
• Index: Strafe Left and Right
  
• Middle: Use
  
• Ring: Crouch
  
• Little: Put weapon away
  
• Mouse: Attack, Jump, Switch Weapons

This allows us to creep around and do most of our fighting without my hand leaving The Claw. There are still a few things we need to use the keyboard for, but they are rarely used.

All in all, The Claw is a great tool, and probably quite useful in other complicated apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and CAD Programs. Also, because it uses no software, it will work in any application under any operating system.

How We Tested

All systems were tested with 128MB of memory and the following benchmarks and applications were performed.

WinBench 99 V1.1
WinBench 99 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures the performance of a PC's graphics, disk, processor, and video subsystems in a Windows environment. WinBench 99's tests can only run on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT systems. WinBench 99 features new, improved graphics tests, improved disk tests, and several all-new tests for all types of storage devices.

WinBench 99's tests are all 32-bit. WinBench 99's Graphics Playback technology reproduces the graphics operations the Winstone 99 business and high-end applications perform, affording you a better-than-ever measure of your PC's graphics subsystem. WinBench 99 returns the following main results that provide an overview of a PC's graphics, disk, and processor performance:

• Business Graphics WinMark(TM) 99 and
  
• Business Disk WinMark 99
  
• High-End Graphics WinMark 99 and
  
• High-End Disk WinMark 99
  
• CPUmark32(TM) (32-bit processor test)
  
• FPU WinMark 99 (32-bit floating-point test)

Games
Quake II V3.20
This is certainly the perennial benchmark of the 3D games genre. On the AMD equipped systems, the latest AMD 3DNOW Quake II patch. The QII 3D engine utilises OpenGL for its graphics wizardry. We ran the "nasty" test Crusher that features a multitude of players and weapons in an all out frag fest. The console command lines for this are:
Timedemo 1
Map crusher.dm2

Quake III Test V1.08
The latest Quake III test which features enhanced detail when compared to QII certainly gives the CPU and graphics 3D engine a pounding. In common with QII, QIII also uses OpenGL rather than Direct3D to render the display.
The console command lines for this test are:
Timedemo 1
Demo Q3Demo1

Unreal V2.25f
Unreal is another game that has an unhealthy appetite for CPU time and 3D bandwidth and just as it and QII have slugged it out for "king of the heap" in their genre, so too Unreal Tournament and QIII appear set for a new battle for supremacy. The console command lines from the title screen are as follows, and remember you can summon as many monsters from the console, to "fill out" the test, as you like.
timedemo 1
To disable the benchmark simply type:
timedemo 0

Unreal Tournament V413
Unreal Tournament a shoot out to see who will win "The Tournament". Whether you are playing against your friends or the intelligent "bots", it pumps out the frames as fast as you can pump out the bullets. We used the utbench demo for testing purposes and ran it using "timedemo 1" from the console. You also have to type out "demoplay utbench" from the console to be able to run the demo. You can download the demo from:
ftp://www.testlab.rmit.edu.au/pub/UTbench.zip

MDK2 Demo V1.0
MDK2 is another shoot 'em up game that takes place not only on the surface of planets, but also on asteroids, spaceships and other weird locations. We ran the demo in 16-bit mode and set the filtering to bi-linear. We also ran MDK2 in 32-bit mode and set the filtering to tri-linear.

Tirtanium V1.9
This is a rather neat little OpenGL test that was developed by a programmer by the name of Michael Tirtasana and can be obtained from his web site at: http://viswiz .gmd.de/~mic/prog3d.html The test involves flying a small spacecraft through a large fog-shrouded city and it certainly gave the systems under test OpenGL a pounding. There is also a Direct3D version of the benchmark.

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