Systemax Inspire 6102 review

With so many different PCs on the market, deciding on the right one for you can be a real hassle.

Do you want the best performance at the expense of upgradability? Or do you want reasonable performance and a system that can be easily upgraded in the future? Ideally, you want the best of both worlds, and Systemax's inspirational new computer aims to give you just that.

VITAL STATISTICS

The Inspire 6102 has an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor thrumming away at its core, allied with 512MB of 400MHz RAM and a 120GB hard disk. None of these things is anything to write home about, but together they provide more than enough power for most people. That doesn't mean, however, that there's nothing remarkable about the Systemax.

Early AMD Athlon 64 processors used a chip that had 754 pins on its underside, and required a motherboard with a socket that was designed specifically for them. AMD later decided to change the number of pins to 939, initially only on their quickest (and priciest) processors. This meant that when you bought a mid-range system, you ended up with a Socket 754-style motherboard, thus limiting the range of chips you could eventually upgrade to. This isn't true of the Inspire 6102. The Athlon 64 3000+ in the Systemax is one of the new breed of reasonably priced processors that uses the more future-proof 939-pin layout.

FUTURE-PROOF

Not only is the Inspire 6102's processor easily upgradable to faster models, as and when prices drop to an affordable level, but the motherboard also has a PCI-Express slot, ready to house one of the new breed of PCI-Express graphics cards. As supplied, it's conspicuously empty. This is because the Systemax uses a graphics chip built in to its motherboard. Using an onboard graphics chip usually means that you'll be hard-pressed to play even fairly old 3D games, let alone new ones - but this is ATI's latest graphics chip, the Xpress 200.

This uses the essential innards from one of ATI's X300 graphics cards. Like other onboard graphics chips, it still uses a portion of the Systemax's 512MB memory. But where other onboard graphics chips are only capable of really basic special effects, the Xpress 200 is capable of providing all the gorgeous-looking effects required by the latest games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. But does it have enough 3D pizzazz to really let you play these games at their best? We pitted the Inspire against our mighty Doom 3 benchmark to see if it really had the muscle to plough through newer games.

We set the screen resolution to 1,024x768, and enabled 4x anti-aliasing to smooth out jagged edges in the picture. We also employed 8x anisotropic filtering to keep the image nice and crisp. At these demanding settings, the Systemax struggled to reach a score of 2.7 frames per second (fps). This isn't as bad as it sounds. Other onboard graphics cards we've tested struggle to get much more than 2fps, or are sometimes so power-starved that they don't even allow us to enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. To cap it all, they make Doom 3 look washed out and awful. The Xpress 200 may be slow in comparison to a proper standalone graphics card, but it does at least render the game with all the special effects in place.

As long as you don't try to run games at a resolution higher than 800x600, occasional gamers will be perfectly happy. We did notice a few odd glitches here and there, but we're quite sure this was because the board was using early graphics driver software. If you do decide to add a PCI-Express graphics card further down the line, the X300 will still be of benefit - you can use it to power a third monitor. Good thinking ATI!