Palicomp Excalibur 630OC35

Palicomp's Excalibur 630OC35 is a gaming PC.

Inside the case is an AMD AM3 Athlon II quad-core processor, which has been overclocked – this means it has been set up by Palicomp to work faster than it is designed to. That can be a tricky or dangerous procedure if done at home, but when it's done by a computer maker it's safer. There's also 4GB of memory and an ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card, with has 1GB of its own memory. The one-year return-to-base warranty covers the overclocked processor too.

Those specifications are very impressive – easily enough to cope with recent games at high levels of detail, and other uses, such as video editing, aren't likely to present any kind of trouble either.

For storage the computer comes with 1TB (1,000GB) of hard disk space – this is in the form of two 500GB disks that have been arranged using a technology called Raid to make one 1TB disk. This makes for slightly faster performance but it can cause problems – if one disk fails you will lose all the information on both disks.

The use of noisy fans has been kept to a minimum, with one big one at the back of the computer's case. Everything is neatly put-together inside, so the air flows naturally, making for better cooling, and there's plenty of room for expansion: the computer has available PCI Express slots, memory slots and drive bays for more hard disks or DVD or Blu-ray drives (a Sony DVD rewriter is fitted, but it can't read or create Blu-ray disks).

A well-designed exterior means there are four USB ports mounted at the front for easy access (at the top rather than lower down), along with an eSata socket and headphone and microphone sockets. Our one criticism here is that the power switch only needs a light touch, and could easily be pressed by brushing it with a foot if it's under a desk – we managed to accidentally turn the computer off twice. On the back are eight more USB sockets, two Firewire ports, and surround sound outputs and inputs. The graphics card has a connection for DVI monitors and two HDMI sockets for flat-panel screens.

In addition to the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Home Premium the free Openoffice software is installed (for word processing and spreadsheets) but if you don't need Windows it can be removed for a £50 discount.

This is a supremely impressive computer at a very competitive price – the only thing to watch out for is that monitor, keyboard and mouse aren't supplied so you'll have to factor in the cost of those if you don't already own them.