Direct vendor Polywell has been steadily making a name for itself by providing good value systems that are solid performers. No exception in these areas, the Polywell Poly 880NF3-3200 comes in an attractive silver aluminum case (appearances count to high-end users). It's the most affordable system in our roundup by far, but through the omission of a few components that would have made it more suitable for the long haul. We have no complaints about the Athlon XP 3200+ and 1GB DDR SDRAM combo. These were helped along on our tests by the same fast 10,000-rpm SATA drives found in the Mach V, also in an integrated PCI RAID 0 configuration. But Polywell didn't add another drive, limiting users to 72GB of storage.

The Poly uses the nVidia GeForce FX 5800 Ultra as the graphics engine, which our head-to-head tests in the past have shown to lag behind the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro more often than not. The 5800 Ultra also tends to have darker output in games and DVDs, so image quality, as seen on the slightly curved screen on the included 19-inch AOC monitor, was not very impressive.

The 52X CD-RW drive is fine when you're burning data or audio (paired here with Ahead Nero as CD creation software), and everyone likes a 16X DVD drive for playback. But buyers of a truly cutting-edge platform will want to add a DVD burner as well. The motherboard-resident audio solution is excellent, but Polywell doesn't let the it sing, pairing it with low-end surround speakers—the Creative Inspire 5.1 5200 set—which averages 47 watts of power.

We've seen it before: Keeping a system affordable requires some cuts. But remember that Polywell is a build-to-order direct vendor, so you can upgrade what we see as less-than-desirable choices. And the Poly is the only system in our review group with Windows XP Professional, Lotus SmartSuite productivity software, and five-year coverage on labor and three years on parts.