ZT Group Ultimate PC A5230

Artwork by Rick Rizner, John Goddard

ZT Group's Ultimate PC A5230 is an inelegant combination of high-end components in a generic case. The system is quick, earning a PC WorldBench score of 144. But a number of design gaffs lessen this system's appeal, starting with an excess of FireWire ports at the expense of available PCI expansion slots. Our system effectively came with no free PCI slots and six FireWire ports (thanks to the inclusion of a dedicated FireWire PCI card). The motherboard has five PCI slots, but in the configuration we received, other cards used four of the five slots, and components projecting from the video card obscured the fifth port. If you wanted to add a modem card or a Serial ATA adapter card for more storage space, you would need to remove an existing PCI card (such as the FireWire card) or else free up space by moving one of the already-installed adapter plates that's connected to the motherboard to the obscured spot under the graphics board. (These plates take up PCI slots without actually plugging into the PCI bus.)

Our A5230 test system came with five USB 2.0 ports, four on the rear of the system, and the fifth sitting under a small flap on the front of the case, just beneath the drive bays. While this front-flap area has room for four ports, our system came with one working USB port, two unconnected ports with stickers labeled "option," and a hole where we would expect to see a fourth port. According to ZT Group, customers could also receive a machine with a more fully populated front panel, depending on the configuration.

The ATI Radeon 9800 XT graphics card performed well in our demanding Return to Castle Wolfenstein test game, especially at higher resolutions. Unreal Tournament 2003 scores, however, were middling, and were lower than comparable systems equipped with NVidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

ZT Group's inclusion of the 19-inch NEC MultiSync FE991SB CRT, rather than an LCD, allowed us to test games at high resolutions up to 1600 by 1200 pixels. This high resolution gave our games sharp detail and good refresh rates; however, the CRT took some adjusting to achieve attractive color graphics. We were surprised by the display's mediocre text quality--text on our test documents was not as sharp as we'd like to see.

This system's audio quality is particularly satisfying. ZT Group combined the excellent Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS sound card with a 5.1-channel Logitech Z-5300 speaker set, which features a monster subwoofer. We got fantastic sonic range in vocals and instruments, and deep, booming bass in DVD movies and games. Our only quibble: The system's sound card lacked clearly labeled inputs (unlike other Audigy 2ZS cards we've seen that have labels or color coding on the ports).

ZT Group provides application and driver CDs for the system's various components and application CDs such as Microsoft Works, DVD writing software, and games. But while the A5230 comes with the collection of component manuals, it lacks an overall system manual.

This high-performance gaming machine provides powerful components in an inefficiently designed box.

Artwork by Rick Rizner, John Goddard

Photograph by Rick Rizner

Photograph by Rick Rizner