Systemax Inspire 3137 review

This month's Lab Test proves you can get a powerful PC with a flat-panel display for only £599.

So why does Systemax's Inspire 3137 come with a conventional CRT monitor? The answer is that even though flat panels have fallen in price, they're still relatively expensive compared with their conventional counterparts. But Systemax has used the money it saved on the display to really beef up the machine's core components.

The first component of note is the MSI GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics card. Anything with a name that long had better be impressive - and it is. GeForce FX is the latest, and much delayed, graphics chipset from nVidia. And it's the first card of its type to be seen in Computer Buyer's Labs.

As a family, GeForce FX is intended to take over where the highly successful GeForce 4 cards left off. More to the point, nVidia hopes its new cards will outperform those of its arch-rival, ATI. The card used here isn't the most powerful incarnation of GeForce FX, though. It's a model intended for budget buyers. But it does come with 128MB of RAM built in, and offers full support for the coming generation of games written using Microsoft's latest multimedia instructions, DirectX 9.

The Systemax scored 9,351 in our 3DMark 2001 test - impressive for a machine that costs only £599. Compare it with the winner of this month's Labs test and the Inspire 3137 is streets ahead. Gamers will not be left wanting.

Working alongside the graphics card is the machine's AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor. This isn't as fast as the 3000+ chips you'll see in big bruisers likes this month's Mesh 3000+ Ultra. But for a £599 machine it's a more than generous choice.

You also get 256MB of RAM, slotted into an MSI MS-6570 nForce 2 motherboard. Again, these are sensible choices for a cheap yet powerful PC.

The hard disk is a 60GB IBM 180GX. That may sound small when you compare it with the 100GB-plus drives in pricier machines. But don't think for a moment that 60GB is a paltry amount - it's more than enough for most users.

These components power the Systemax to a score of 1,170 in our 2D performance test. Once again the Systemax is ahead of any machine in this month's Lab Test.

Rather than fitting both a DVD and CD-R into the Systemax, the machine has a single Samsung SM-348B 'combo' drive, which performs the functions of both. For a budget buyer, this is a great idea. It means you save cash, but don't lose out in terms of what you can actually do with your machine. The only down side is that copying CDs becomes less straightforward, as you can't copy directly from disc to disc.

The PC's 17in CTX EX7000F monitor is a compromise. It lacks the crystal clarity of the 'aperture grille'-style monitors that come with super-posh PCs. Its colours aren't excessively rich either. But given the overall price of this machine, that can be forgiven. The monitor does the job but doesn't dazzle.

Another feather in the Systemax's cap is that it has a Lexmark X74 multifunction device. This a scanner, inkjet printer and photocopier all-in-one. Like the monitor, the X74 falls into the budget bracket. Its performance and print quality are no match for those of our Top 50 multifunction device, the Hewlett-Packard PSC 2210 (reviewed May 2003). That said, plain paper, photos and colour copies are more than reasonable. It took just over four and a half minutes to print a full-colour A4 page. Black and white print quality was sharp enough for business letters, and our five-page text document printed in just over a minute.