NetHighStreet appears to have squeezed more from its budget than any of the others. This is most apparent from the front panel of its beige midi-tower case, which holds both a DVD rewriter and a secondary DVD reader. This makes backup copying of non-copyright material a very simple procedure and is something none of the other systems can do directly.

The strong specification doesn't end there, either, as the Net Elite 499 uses an Athlon XP 3000+ processor, that bit quicker than all but Carrera's Athlon 64. The 120GB Samsung hard drive provides plenty of fixed storage and, on the expansion side, there's a FireWire port as well as four USB 2 sockets.

We thought NetHighStreet might have economised at the graphics end of things, but a Radeon 9600 Pro video adapter with its full 128MB of graphics memory soon dispelled that idea. It runs another 17-inch Samsung SyncMaster monitor, which gives a clean, well-proportioned display.

Even the sound system, which runs from the 5.1 channel nForce 2 graphics chip on the system board, is provided with a 2.1 set of Hercules speakers. These look better than they sound, with a rather muddy mid-range offering little precision, but they're still adequate for game effects. Even the keyboard and mouse, a matched set from Microsoft including an optical mouse, is good value at this price.

Under test, the system lived up well to its specifications and produced a SYSmark index of 245, well up the field. Its 3D results were better still, with a 3DMark 03 result of 2,606, beaten only by the JAL PC. This is a system that won't fight shy of even today's most rigorous games, not a bad achievement for a computer costing less than £500 before VAT.

There's very little software with the Net Elite 499, just a copy of Power DVD and some utilities, but overall the excellent specification and strong performance more than make up for this shortcoming. As long as you can live with beige rather than black and silver, this system is the best value in this group.