With six Corporate PCs, all using Intel's 933MHz Pentium III and 128MB of RAM, which one (if any) stands out from the rest? It may seem a little unfair to judge three of the newcomers in this area of the market against three of the biggest and most established providers of corporate systems, but it shows that there are systems available for all sizes of business.

The Mesh PC has the best hardware specification of them all and represents excellent value for money, but - and in this market it's a very big but - it doesn't come with any form of manageability or security extras. But the Mesh isn't alone in this; the Simply machine doesn't include any of these features either. The Tiny unit at least includes a copy of LANDesk Client Manager. However, compared to the other three systems all offer very good value for money if such manageability is not an issue - which we feel it should be.

As you might expect, the systems from the three big players in this market - Dell, Hewlett Packard and IBM - have manageability and security as a major design point, but this comes at some cost.

The latest version of Dell's Optiplex, the GX150SD, is the cheapest of the three since its price includes a monitor while the other two don't have monitors included as standard (something that's not unusual in the corporate sector, where boxes are changed more often than screens). It's so well designed and amazingly quiet that it's hard not to recommend it outright.

But if manageability and security are more of a factor than price and overall performance, then it is hard to separate the Hewlett Packard Vectra VL400 and the IBM NetVista A40p systems. The Vectra has the better manageability features - TopTools and the e-DiagTools - while the NetVista has the embedded security chip. Our choice? It's too close to call. This one's down to your personal security preference.

As an aside, one surprising thing in this round up was the trend towards faster graphics cards, a legacy of Nvidia's domination in the graphics market. As the standard in other market sectors becomes based around 64MB cards, the lower rated cards such as the 32MB GeForce2 MX are getting cheaper and more abundant.

Gone are the days when the only option for a corporate system was to use the integrated, low-powered graphics chip. All six of the systems reviewed were equipped with the Intel 815 chipset with integrated graphics, but only one uses it, the rest relying on some form of plug-in graphics card. IT managers beware; the lunchtime gamers could be back in business.