Joel Strauch

Polywell Poly 883VR-2200

Polywell's Poly 883VR-2200 comes with AMD's 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ processor. Combining that CPU with 512MB of 333-MHz DDR memory, our Poly test unit earned a very good score of 124 on our PC WorldBench 4 tests. (The Polywell Poly 880NF we tested two months earlier earned a 125 with a 1.73-GHz Athlon 2100+ CPU.) Polywell paired twin 40GB hard drives via an integrated Ultra DMA/133 IDE RAID controller; the two drives appear as a single 80GB drive on the desktop, but should speed drive-intensive operations like saving large image files. The system has four USB 1.1 ports (two on the front and two on the rear), as well as two FireWire (IEEE 1394) and four USB 2.0 ports on the back of the case for connecting devices such as digital video cameras, external hard drives, and external CD-RW drives. The Logitech wireless keyboard and optical mouse combination allows smooth and accurate typing, plus plenty of Internet and multimedia hot-keys.
The glass-accented aluminum midsize tower looks stylish, but to remove the side of the case you must use a screwdriver to take out the two screws that hold it in place. Putting the cover back on is also rather awkward: If you don't align it correctly, it won't go back on properly. The interior is somewhat messy, with various cables hindering access to the RAM slots. As configured, our test system had only two PCI slots and two external drive bays open for expansion; all the internal bays are taken up by the hard drives.
The 18-inch Nfren NF-1800MA LCD monitor displayed crisp, legible text at its native resolution of 1280 by 1024. The LCD rendered rich colors on our test photo, but flesh tones were a little dark. The GeForce4 Ti 4600-based Asus V8460UL graphics board sports 128MB of DDR graphics memory and has output ports for standard VGA (for an analog monitor like the one that came with our test system), S-Video (for a TV or VCR), and DVI (for a digital monitor). The system ships with Lotus SmartSuite 2002. Polywell's documentation includes a setup guide and a spiral-bound manual housed in a black box. Although not specific to this particular system and light on illustrations, the manual includes detailed chapters on upgrading and troubleshooting Polywell systems in general.
The Polywell 883VR-2200 provides a good selection of features in a stylish package for small-office use.