Auzen is building up a very solid reputation in the sound card market. Its previous offering, the X-Meridian was a very capable performer when it came to music and home cinema, but wasn't so adept when faced with the challenge of the modern game.

X-Fi processor, Great build quality, Optical output port

DDL, DTS support delay

A serious rival to the Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty series of cards, with the potential to become even better

As the only remaining example of the GeForce G7x series of cards, it's a nostalgic goodbye to a favoured texel turner of yore. While the 7900GS can still hold its head up high in many games, the truth is that it's been starting to struggle

Decent enough performance

Starting to show its age

While it's still a great card, this last example of the G7x series is starting to look a little dated

To be fair, we're not really looking at the 8500 card as a potential upgrade for a hardcore games system. Unless you're content playing your favourite games at 800 x 600 without any image quality settings on there's no way this will ever cut the mustard

Good choice for media centre functionality

Forget about gaming

A good media centre card but limited in terms of real grunt

Time was, if you wanted high-end gear in an off-thepeg unit, you paid upwards of £3,000. Well, this rig flicks the bird to that concept. No PC we've ever tested has run games as well as this one.

The best games PC we've ever seen, GeForce 8800GTX plus a plethora of other great components

Monitor could be a touch bigger

One of the best all-inclusive gaming packages on the market, and Vista ready

When we review something, we apportion an amount of time to do it. Unfortunately, much of the time was wasted wrestling with an obscure driver set and fiddling with what appears to be a faulty DVI port

Compact design, Impressive specification, Integral TV tuner

Obscure driver set, Can run rather hot, Problematic DVI port

Gadget fetishists will love it, but may be too pricey for the rest