Watford has gone for a mini-tower case to house its Aries Prefecta 5100 Pro 120. This doesn't decrease its footprint, of course, just its height, and isn't the only unconventional choice here. It's the only system, for example, to be based around an Intel Pentium 4 processor, rather than an AMD Athlon. This should ensure strong performance, but also limits the budget for other components, as the Pentium 4 chip costs more.

There's a 120GB Maxtor hard drive for fixed storage, but just a simple CD-RW/DVD combo drive as the only optical drive. This is restrictive, as you don't even have facilities for copying CD-RW discs on the fly, let alone DVDs.

Probably more restrictive in overall terms, though, is the decision to use a system board with integrated graphics. While this cuts the cost, it also cuts the processing power and even with the Radeon 9100 IGP graphics processor, 3D performance is pretty poor.

The design also takes 32MB out of the system's 512MB of main memory, though with this much on hand it doesn't hold the processor back. The graphics card drives a 17-inch AOC monitor, which gives a fair picture and has a very easy-to-use single thumbwheel control for set up.

Sound comes from a Realtek 5.1 channel sound chip on the system board, but drives a simple pair of Altec Lansing 120 stereo speakers, which, despite the high-quality brand name, are little better than other cheap and cheerful satellite speakers.

The system's performance can be divided into two parts; applications and games. SYSmark produced an overall index of 271, just a whisker behind the result from Carrera's Vision 64 ITR. When you break this down into the Internet content and office productivity modules, though, you'll see a heavy imbalance, with 417 scored for the former and just 176 for the latter.

3DMark 2001SE produced a poor index of 5,272, but this was comparatively good compared with the 735 scored under 3DMark 03. This low performance ensures jerky graphics on many recent 3D games. The system comes with copies of Ability Office and Panda anti-virus software, but when you consider the whole package, it doesn't look impressive against competition.