ABS Awesome 6500

Artwork by Rick Rizner, John Goddard

The Awesome 6500 is the first PC we've seen from ABS to be built around Intel's new 925X Express chip set, which lets the 6500 use the PCI Express bus and the latest 533-MHz DDR2 dual-channel memory. Yet it is reasonably priced at $3199.

The 6500 comes in a retro-styled midsize-tower case made by Cooler Master. You can access six drive bays from the front, four of which are occupied by a 12X DVDA?RW drive, a 16X DVD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and a six-in-one flash memory card reader. A shiny curved door hides the drives, but the plastic ABS nameplate sometimes slid downward while the door was open, making it difficult to close again.

You can't help noticing the round analog decibel meter at the bottom of the front panel. When we cranked up the audio, the needle bounced around, but it doesn't really serve much purpose other than looking cool and adding to the retro feel of the case. More practical is the original placement of some of the ports: A number of ports are conveniently located on the sides of the case, at the lower edges of the front panel: Two USB 2.0 ports and one Firewire port are on the left, and the audio ports (and a headphone volume control) are located on the right side.

If you peer through the transparent side panel you'll see a 3.4-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor (which has 2MB of L3 cache) and a gigabyte of memory occupying just two of the four memory slots. The fan on the graphics card in the PCI Express X16 slot blocks one of the three regular PCI slots, but two are still usable. There are also two PCI Express X1 slots, though you won't find many X1 cards for sale yet. The motherboard (an ASUS P5AD2) offers several additional connectors, such as a joystick port, mounted on three panels that also block some of the PCI slots. Inserting a PCI card into one of these slots may take some juggling.

Two 80GB Serial ATA disk drives are connected in a RAID-0 configuration for speed. With six additional SATA connectors on the motherboard and two open internal drive bays, you have plenty of space for more storage.

The 6500's score of 96 in our WorldBench 5 tests was just below the score earned by a similarly configured Dell, the Dimension 8400, which is also built on the 925X chip set; it scored 98 with its slightly faster, 3.6-GHz processor and the same amount of memory as the Awesome 6500.

The PCI Express EVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card and NEC FE990-BK CRT monitor that came with our test system rendered reasonably good text and graphics, but small fonts were a little difficult to read, shadows in photos looked a bit dark, and we noticed occasional moire fringes. You may want to consider spending a bit more for an LCD monitor (ABS offers the 17-inch Samsung SyncMaster 710MP LCD for an additional $180). As our tests put the top-of-the-line PCI Express graphics card through its paces, the system generated very high frame rates at 1600-by-1200 pixels: it achieved 138 frames per second on Return to Castle Wolfenstein and 246 fps for Unreal Tournament 2003. While these frame rates are very impressive, we've seen even better from systems fitted with AGP graphics cards, such as the Velocity Micro Vision FX. Our tests have shown that PCI Express offers future potential, but no current, advantage over AGP.

Setting up the THX-certified Logitech Z680 5.1 speakers was a breeze, thanks to the help of an on-screen wizard that guided us through making the connections between the sound card and the speakers. The combination of these speakers and the integrated C-Media CM9880 sound chip produced beautifully clear audio with plenty of rich bass.

Finally, the ASUS motherboard includes a gigabit ethernet adapter.

The ABS Awesome 6500 has an attractive retro look and a number of nice touches, but the Dimension 8400 is cheaper and has a better set of features.

Photograph by Rick Rizner

Photograph by Rick Rizner

Photograph by Rick Rizner