Verdict: Brimming with features, but it's expensive

The Mega 865 Deluxe's gimmick is more useful than most - it's a built-in hi-fi you can operate without turning on the PC. There are two power buttons on the front - one for the PC, one for the hi-fi. With this engaged, you can play audio and MP3 CDs, and listen to the radio, although you need to connect the optical drive to the correct Molex plug, as only one is wired up to provide power in hi-fi mode.

It all looks very promising when you start building, as there's no need to remove any drive cages to fit the CPU or RAM. Fitting the graphics card, however, is excruciating, as the power cables to the motherboard interfere with the top of the PCB. Once you've forced those out the way and thrust your AGP card home, preferably without breaking off any capacitors, the cables then interfere with the optical drive. At least the AGP slot is in the right position to allow dual-slot graphics cards.

Still, aside from the hi-fi mode and FM radio tuner, the Mega 865 Deluxe is distinctly feature rich. There's a memory card reader on the front, and on-board 802.11b WiFi. A drop-down flap reveals a load of audio connections, including S/PDIF, two USB 2 ports, and both powered and unpowered FireWire ports. Parallel and serial ports on the rear offer legacy connectivity on top of the LAN, USB 2 and FireWire. The Mega 865 Deluxe is also the only SFF to provide a built-in modem.

At its default settings, the Mega 865 Deluxe was a reasonable performer. Unfortunately, this doesn't carry through to overclocking. Although we managed to get it to complete the 2D benchmarks reliably with an FSB of 230MHz, there were visual artefacts in games, so we had to reduce the FSB right down to 210MHz. This gave us a modest 5 per cent boost in 2D and 3D - worth having, but not up to the overclockability of the AOpen or Shuttle Pentium 4 SFFs.

The Mega 865 Deluxe is a tempting SFF proposition. It's smaller than most, packed with features, and its gimmicks are mostly useful, but you pay a high price for these privileges.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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