If you're thinking of giving PC gaming a try—but don't want to spend a fortune figuring out if it's for you or not—check out the Cyberpower Gamer Ultra SLI Basic. It has some decent power and is suited for playing older (but still relevant) games like Prey, Company of Heroes, and Half Life 2, more than it is for playing the newer games like Supreme Commander, Crysis, and World in Conflict. If, eventually, you want to move to newer games, the PC has room for upgrades.

The Gamer Ultra SLI Basic sits in a budget gaming chassis, with the requisite windowed case door, some flashy accents on the LED-lit fans, and analog gauges on the front panel door. It's a little garish when you open the case: The DVD burner's bezel looks as if it was spray-painted with silver Krylon paint rather than molded as a silver DVD panel. There's a lot of room inside the case for the usual tinkerer's components, like a half-dozen hard drives (though there are only three free SATA ports), dual PCIe x16 graphics card slots, two more PCIe x1 card slots, and another pair of PCI card slots. The system does come with a reasonably powerful (600W) Cooler Master power supply, so it's ready for additional components. Since the case is easy to open and work in, this is a good choice if you're buying the system with the intention of investing part of your budget in upgrades.

The guts of the system include a midrange AMD Athlon X2 6000+ dual-core processor, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory, and a pair of 512MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics cards. These components work together to give the system some decent performance numbers. The Cyberpower was able to finish the Windows Media Encoder test in 1 minute 7 seconds. To put that in perspective, four quad-core-powered multimedia PCs that we recently tested, which cost $100 to $200 more, all completed this same task in 46 seconds. The Cyberpower finished the Photoshop CS3 test in 46 seconds (as opposed to around 30 seconds for the quad-core PCs).

The Cyberpower's gaming performance is a mixed bag. It can load the newer DX10 games like Crysis and World in Conflict, but it can't play them well—despite having two graphics cards. When we tested these games at 1,280-by-1,024 resolution, the Cyberpower produced extremely slow frame rates in both Crysis (9 frames per second) and World in Conflict (10 fps), making these games unplayable. Things improved when I loaded an older DX9 game: The system was able to play Company of Heroes very smoothly at 44 fps. What this all comes down to is that the Cyberpower Gamer Ultra SLI Basic is well suited for older games, but you'll have to pay to upgrade the graphics to play the newest games at playable frame rates.

I don't cover many cheap gaming systems. However, when compared with cheaper (sub-$500) PCs like the Lenovo IdeaCentre K210 and the eMachines T5274, the Cyberpower's performance certainly justifies its higher cost. Spending just $200 more, though, can get you a better-performing desktop (minus the gaming accoutrements).

So who is this system for? If you're intrigued by the gaming culture and don't want to spend too much money to find out if it's for you or not, the Cyberpower Gamer Ultra SLI Basic is a good choice. And when you master Doom 3 and want to try your hand at some new games, the Gamer Ultra can be upgraded fairly easily, giving you even more bang for your buck.

Check out the Cyberpower Gamer Ultra SLI Basic's performance test results.

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