Cube 247 Zeta ST4 review

The Zeta is a well-equipped PC, but its integrated graphics chip hampers its 3D performance.

FEATURES

The Zeta may not have Gigabit Ethernet, but the 12 USB ports more than compensate for this. There's also a FireWire port, a feature that's absent from all the other PCs here. To prevent potentially dangerous tampering, the BIOS is password-protected, although the password can be obtained from Cube's technical support.

The Zeta is one of the few PCs to include a 200GB hard disk and a coaxial S/PDIF port for connecting high-end hi-fi equipment. The 17" AMW monitor is reasonably easy to adjust, although it displayed some subtle banding in our greyscale and colour transition tests.

Although the Zeta has one free PCI slot and two free PCI Express slots, the corresponding brackets on the back are already occupied by risers for the USB, S-video, S/PDIF and composite ports. Most of these could have been moved to other brackets, unblocking access to the PCI slots.

PERFORMANCE

Thanks to its 3GHz Pentium 4 630 processor, the Zeta performed well in our video-encoding test, achieving a score of 108. It managed an above-average 106 in our applications benchmarks.

Although the Pentium 4 is a powerful processor, the Zeta shares system memory with the integrated graphics chip, which saps its performance in tasks that need lots of RAM. Initially, the system managed to score just 75 in our image-editing benchmark, but after reducing the amount of system memory allocated to the graphics chip we increased this to 93.

The Radeon X300 graphics chip made Doom 3 virtually unplayable, managing only 2fps, and is not cut out for even casual gaming.