An excellent example of a complete package for a reasonable price, the TI Value 1500 includes a 17in BenQ LCD monitor as well as a basic keyboard and mouse. It held up quite well in our performance tests and the gaming capabilities achieved moderate scores as well. A good jack-of-all-trades, this PC should handle most users' needs and has room to boost performance with an upgrade.

Beneath the stock Intel cooler lies an E6400 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, supported by 1GB of Kingston 533MHz DDR2 RAM. With these running the show, the TI Value PC landed an impressive score of 118 in our World Bench 5 test, more than enough to run even the more demanding software packages available today and provides a good platform for the Windows Vista operating system.

We ran an MP3 encoding test by encoding 53 minutes worth of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3s, which the TI Value completed in just one minute 53 seconds. This score is fairly indicative of the CPU and suggests the system should suffice for most people's encoding needs. Also installed is a Palit GeForce 7600GT graphics card which is still a reliable card that's holding its own against the waves of new graphics cards.

We ran 3DMark 2006 as well as 2001 SE to see how the system performed. In 3DMark 2006 it scored 3286 which is a good score for most current games, even at medium to high quality settings. In 3DMark 2001 SE it achieved 26,317 which is overkill for any older games. We also tested it using F.E.A.R., in which it scored 31fps (frames per second) at maximum settings, including 4x anti-aliasing (AA) and 16x anisotropic filtering (AF) at a resolution of 1280x960. Dropping the resolution to 1024x768 produced a more playable average of 45fps. In Quake 4 it scored an easy 77.1fps, more than enough for smooth gaming.

This system comes a DVD re-writer and has a 250GB hard drive and a 3.5in floppy drive. The cable clutter within the case is kept to a minimum since the graphics card doesn't require a dedicated power cable and only these three devices and the motherboard require them. The 250mm fan on the side panel draws more than enough air into the case, directly cooling the motherboard and assisting the cooling of the graphics card and CPU. The glowing 120mm fan at the front of the PC directly cools the hard drive, but also helps push air from the front of the case out a grill at the rear.

The Intel 965L TCK motherboard has six USB ports on the rear panel as well as one FireWire port and one gigabit Ethernet port. There are four 3.5in hard drive bays, three of which are free so adding more drives should be easy enough.