NEC has been selling PCs direct for a couple of years now and its buying power has a big effect on the value it can build into its systems. The most obvious sign of this on the outside is the 100MB Iomega Zip drive, sitting between the CD and the floppy. It's useful to have the larger capacity removable format of the Zip for back-up and file transfer.

Inside, the hard drive is a very healthy 19GB, too, and there's also a Celeron 533Mhz chip with 64MB of main memory. The system board is again a MicroATX design, but it has an extra expansion slot, in the shape of a single ISA format socket, as well as three PCI ones. Modem and sound features come from the main board, which again uses the Intel 810 chipset for just about everything.

Graphics performance is weak because of this, but the monitor, one of NEC's own, compensates. It gives an excellent picture and is clear, with high contrast. NEC bundles a full version of Works Suite 2000 with the machine, too, which includes Word 2000.

This must be one of the favourites in this group. Although not quite the fastest, it has an excellent specification and represents very good value for money.