Aria Gladiator Proteus 550 review

Aria's Gladiator Proteus 550 is fitted with an AMD processor rather than an Intel model. Since AMD chips tend to be cheaper, this explains how the Proteus also manages to pack a 24in monitor, a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive for this price. Aria has also taken the unusual step of fitting a Wi-Fi card into the single PCI-E x1 slot, and it's also unusual at this price in having a memory card reader.

Aria's taste for the unusual starts with a generous 24in widescreen monitor from Edge10, a British company whose monitors we've been impressed with before. The M240 doesn't have LED backlighting; the CCFL backlight is dull and has a strong blue cast to it which makes images seem colder than they should be. Controls are crude and fiddly and, as there's no DVI cable in the box, you have to connect it via analogue VGA.

The Proteus 550's Cooler Master case looks smart and is bristling with extras. On the front panel is a memory card reader that has slots for most cards, plus an extra USB port. The rear panel has the widest variety of ports that we've seen for a while, with four USB2 and two USB3 ports, plus single eSATA and FireWire ports. There's 7.1 analogue outputs and an optical S/PDIF output.