CCL's contribution to this group certainly looks the part. With an acrylic panel in the left-hand side, so you can see the blue lights of its two extra internal fans, and imitation bubble tubes running down either side of its front panel, it makes an effective talking point as well as a useful PC.

The system is based around an Athlon XP 2500+ processor; not quite the fastest chip in AMD's 32-bit range, but still a fair performer. It comes with 512MB of memory and a healthy 160GB hard drive, which has plenty of room for temporary and permanent storage.

Added to this, though, is a DVD rewriter which can handle all the current DVD and CD rewritable and recordable formats. There's no second drive to help with disk-to-disk copies, but something has to give at this price point.

The graphics adapter is a Radeon 9600 card from Sapphire, which gives a good account of itself, both in performance and picture quality terms. Here it drives a 17-inch CTX monitor, which like most current CRT designs is not quite flat, but with a flat sheet of glass on the front of the tube to make it appear so.

Sound is again provided by an onboard sound chip, this one from ADi, and its 5.1 channel output drives a 2.1 channel set of speakers from Genius. This combination gives a fair sound, a little thin in the top registers, but with a comfortable bass line.

A full copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2004 is provided, and this is an excellent software bundle providing not only Works but Word, AutoRoute, Microsoft Money and several other useful programs. You could happily work with no other applications than these for some while, before finding any business work you couldn't handle.

Test results showed the AS25-EL to be fair but a little unexciting in both serious applications and games. An overall SYSmark result of 173 is a little weak and the 3DMark results of 7,905 and 2,329 show it has average, but not devastating performance. Overall, this system is high-value, looks good and comes with an excellent collection of software.