Emagen Vitesse P4X

Prebuilt machines don't often find their way into the pages of Atomic. Unless, that is, they're extra special. Boxed in an admittedly plastic-looking silver-coloured case, Emagen have gone and thrown in a tonne of good kit for some potentially great gaming at a low currency factor, primarily because this is actually the system that will be used in the official World Cyber Games. Regardless, wallet weight is always a good thing.

Prebuilt machines don't often find their way into the pages of Atomic. Unless, that is, they're extra special. Boxed in an admittedly plastic-looking silver-coloured case, Emagen have gone and thrown in a tonne of good kit for some potentially great gaming at a low currency factor, primarily because this is actually the system that will be used in the official World Cyber Games. Regardless, wallet weight is always a good thing.

For a WCG system, it has to be damn good, so with great zest we whipped it out and started stressing it to decapitative levels. We expected reasonable results with an 800MHz FSB 3GHz P4 and a new 128MB RADEON 9800SE. Off we trotted to 3DMark2001SE, and running in high quality mode it returned 14,037, 10,436 and 7,732 3DMarks for the 1,024 x 768, 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 tests, respectively. These are incredible results for such a stupidly cheap machine. Hot damn.

For cooling, it has two 80mm case fans with blue LEDs and a 350W PSU with an additional two fans. Again, the PSU itself has several obligatory blue LEDs in it. Seeming like the attack of the <i>blews</i>, it's a tad on the loud side, also containing two more feisty fans, each on the CPU and GPU. But this won't have you screaming 'my bleeding ears!' to anyone.

This system is quite the overclocker. With its stock Intel reference design cooling, we managed to squeeze a decent splosh of juice out of this baby, upping it to 3.21GHz, and yes, stability-wise there were absolutely no problems. We had it looping the Atomic 3DMark2001 quality benchmark dozens of times in software mode at 1,600 x 1,200 with antialiasing set to 6x -- not a single artefact to be seen. The only tweaking problem we had was the lack of a proper memory frequency setter instead of the ratio-to-CPU option.

Something of special note is the inclusion of six separate DDR channels with the impressive ability to run these in Dual Channel.

For $1,899, this is purely the box -- no mouse or keyboard -- and this is just fine. No one likes using those horrid pre-chosen uncomfortable interface devices anyway.

Performing rather close to the top of the speed ladder, this is an extremely good buy for a gaming machine sitting at sub-$2000. Without a doubt, this is one hell of a worthy buy if you're after a cheap, pre-built, yet beastly system.