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Unfortunately, the effect of the point job has been spoiled by some poor finishing. When the case door was sprayed the interior clearly wasn't taped up and when you open it up, half the base under the door is painted and half isn't, which just looks sloppy and isn't what you want when you've spent over two and a half thousand pounds on a PC.

The case has quite a heavy door and magnetically closes with a satisfying thunk. The door also has a lock on it, but this won't prevent would be thieves from removing the sides, which are held in place with thumb screws. The door also means that you have to open it to get to the drives and it's easy to forget to open it after you've burnt a DVD making the tray hit the door as it ejects.

Behind the door you'll find two optical disc drives, one of which is an NEC-4550A DVD Writer that will pretty much deal with any disc you throw at it, including burning dual layer DVD+R discs at up to 8x and DVD-RAM discs at 5x. Above this is a Sony DVD-ROM drive so you can do disc-to-disc copying and there are three free external 5.25in bays above. Below the optical drives are both a floppy disc drive, useful only for BIOS updates, and an X-Pro card reader with a USB port. To the side of the case are two further USB ports as well as a FireWire connection and a microphone and headphone line-in.

Internally, the choice of components proved to be something of a surprise. The processor, a dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 is a good choice, especially combined with the pair of monstrous GeForce 7900 GTX cards. There are also two 250GB hard disk drives and no less than four sticks of memory. To make any criticism of this level of hardware could be considered churlish, but I'm going to do it any way.

First, supplying four sticks of memory in an Athlon system is a mistake. The integrated memory controller on the Athlon 64 cannot address four DIMMs without dropping the Command Rate in the BIOS to 2T, instead of the faster 1T setting. What Wired2Fire should have done was supply 2GB on two DIMMs. Supplying four DIMMs is clearly a cost cutting measure and it also means that you can't upgrade. Supplying four DIMMs would only really be acceptable if it was 4GB of memory.

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