Verdict: Not so much a prodigy as simply prodigious

As a company, Demonite is almost exactly the same age as Custom PC, so it's interesting to see how its PCs have developed over the last year. In that time, they have evolved considerably, from basic Chenming-housed green systems to PCs with pre-overclocked CPUs. This particular Demonite PC represents a further stage in the evolutionary process, as it's the first one to have water cooling.

For this reason we decided to unbolt Demonite's cage and let it play with the other beasts in the Dream PC zoo: Alienware, SavRow and Voodoo PC. The Prodigy 6800 is the end result, a water-cooled PC built inside a yellow Xeno chassis, bundled with a huge RAID array and 11 - yes, 11 - speakers.

The beating heart of this particular xenomorph is a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which is overclocked to 3.7GHz by upping the FSB from 200MHz to 220MHz (effectively 880MHz). This sits in an Asus P4C800 Deluxe motherboard, a perfectly reasonable choice, though not an outstanding overclocker. Two DIMM sockets are filled with 512MB sticks of Corsair XMS 4000 RAM, leaving two sockets free for future upgrades.

The AGP slot is filled to breaking point with a Gainward CoolFX Ultra 2600 Golden Sample graphics card. Its monstrously long name is matched by its monstrous size and price. The card is based on the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU and is paired with an Innovatek waterblock. The actual cooling is carried out by a Zalman Reserator 1, which is also used to cool the CPU. Even though the Reserator 1 is near silent (it's fanless), the Demonite isn't the quietest Dream PC - the SavRow system takes that honour. Hooked up to the graphics card is an NEC Mitsubishi Multisync LCD 2080UX+ monitor, and if you're still with me after that second mouthful of a name, it's a 20in TFT with a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200. Thanks to its 16ms response time, it's a monitor with which you'd be happy to play Doom 3.

All the other Dream PCs are housed in custom-designed cases, but the Xeno is an off-the-shelf Taiwanese design. It's also suspiciously similar to the Alienware case (ahem!), as both comprise a basic steel chassis covered by a shapely plastic exoskeleton. Unfortunately, the exoskeleton is very flimsy and easily broken. More seriously, there isn't a huge amount of airflow through the case, as there's no front fan intake. The Xeno comes in five different colours: pearl, ruby, yellow, sapphire and graphite. However, we think more time needs to be spent on improving the build quality and airflow than producing fancy colour schemes.

This Demonite is the first PC we've seen with the new Maxtor 7B250S0 hard disk. It's still a 7,200rpm S-ATA drive, but it has a humungous 16MB cache - double that of the 74GB WD Raptor. Each drive provides 250GB of storage, and with two drives striped together in RAID 0, the read/write performance of the 500GB volume is hard to beat.

In a particularly stunning demonstration of unoriginality, all four Dream PCs came fitted with the same Plextor PX-712A optical drive. Okay, it's a Plextor, so it can rip CDs ludicrously fast and burn DVD+Rs at 12x, but couldn't at least one PC manufacturer have dared to be different?

Not content with providing 500MB of storage space, Demonite has also bundled 11 speakers, eight with the 7.1 Creative T7770 set and three more with the 2.1 Creative L3500 set. The T7700 is a great set of surround-sound speakers, although it's not nearly as cool as the THX-approved Creative S750 set included with the other Dream PCs.

The three speakers that make up the L3500 are for the Creative Wireless Music device. This rather cunning box can stream MP3s and WMAs over an 802.11b/g wireless network or USB port. If you go down the wireless route you'll need to buy a wireless hub/router if you don't have one already, but then you'll be able to place the Wireless Music in a different room to your PC and listen to music on it. It's a rather cool device, although we reckon most people would probably want to connect the Wireless Music to their existing home stereo, so the inclusion of an extra set of speakers is a bit wasteful.

Continuing the home media centre theme is a digital TV tuner card and a copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition. MCE includes a built-in picture viewer, PVR, DVD and music player in one easy-to-use interface, but it's more suited to SFF silent PCs than bright yellow behemoths costing £3,500.

PERFORMANCE

The Demonite was one of the first systems to feel the wrath of our new Media Benchmarks 2004 test suite, although it did escape relatively unscathed. The CD ripping and video encoding scores are some of the fastest we've ever seen, so there's no point in denying that this is one very fast PC.

But wait a minute! What about that water-cooled GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card, isn't that going to get a mention? Even though the CPU was overclocked to 3.7GHz, the GPU to 450MHz and the graphics RAM to 1.2GHz, the Demonite proved to be less of a gaming demon than you might expect. It's no slouch to be sure, but the Athlon 64-powered SavRow is quicker still, while the Alienware PC sets a new standard for gaming pleasure.

Unfortunately, we were unable to squeeze any extra performance out of the Demonite, despite the Reserator 1 water-cooling system. This is mainly because Pentium 4 Extreme Editions generally don't overclock as far as standard Pentium 4s, although the Asus P4C800 Deluxe motherboard isn't a great overclocker either.

CONCLUSION

The review of this Demonite might sound a little bit like a shopping list, but that's exactly the sort of feeling this PC generates. You can tell that Demonite has made an effort to choose the latest and greatest components, but there isn't anything to set it apart. It's a decent Ultimate PC, but not really up to the standard of a Dream PC. There's no real sense of a personal touch or daring to be different. What says it all is that £899 will get you another Demonite PC in exactly the same case - not exactly the sort of thing you want to hear, having spent upwards of £3,500.

• 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

• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs