When you say 'money is no object', you really have to mean it with this Armari system, although it's not, strictly speaking, a consumer system unless you're seriously into making and editing home movies. The company has pulled out all the stops and built a real top-of-the-range PC geared for video editing and related tasks.

The R850, housed in a spectacular bright blue, all-aluminium case, has plenty of performance, thanks to a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 processor and its standard 128MB of Rambus memory. Armari supports this with twin UDMA-100 (a fast IDE protocol) hard drives, so you can use one for storing applications and the other for your video data. To deal with video capture from camera or other video sources, there's a Pinnacle DV500 card. While this isn't as versatile as, say, an equivalent Matrox kit, it does work happily with third-party graphics cards.

In this case, the graphics card is a 3DBlaster GeForce2 Ultra from Creative, with a full 64MB of video memory. It drives a 19-inch, flat-faced Mitsubishi monitor, which gives an excellent picture; well focused and with enough detail for resolutions up to 1600 by 1200 pixels.

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Sound is equally well taken care of, with a six-channel Creative card - fully capable of decoding Dolby Digital 5.1 sound streams - and speakers to match. The machine, which comes with both DVD and CD-RW drives, is just as comfortable playing commercial DVD movies as it is helping you make your own. The only set-back is the price but, in this case, you get what you pay for.