Product Reviews

A barebones kit is a useful halfway point between buying an off-the-shelf PC and a box of separate components. You get the freedom to choose the main parts you want to fit, such as the processor, memory and hard disk, with the convenience of the PC being already half built. Asus's T3-P5945GCX is the replacement for the T3-P5945GC, which won a Budget Buy award in our barebones Labs in Shopper 243. It has a slightly modified design and supports current Intel processors with a 1,333MHz frontside bus.

The T3-P5945GCX is available in both silver and gloss black. It's both taller and deeper than most small-form-factor barebones, such as Shuttle's XPC range. The advantage of this is that there's more room in the case. The custom motherboard means you can't upgrade it in the future, but the rest of the PC uses standard desktop components. There's room for a standard LGA775 processor cooler, so you don't need a low-profile model. You can fit up to 4GB of DDR2 memory in the

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two memory slots, and there's room for two 3½in hard disks and a 5¼in optical drive. There are three SATA and one IDE ports, and the case is designed for up to two SATA hard disks and one SATA or IDE optical drive. Even the power supply is a standard ATX model, so will be easy to replace if it breaks.

Despite this, Asus has made some strange design decisions. Unlike the previous model, the T3-P5945GCX has no network port on the motherboard, so its single PCI slot is taken up by a 10/100 Ethernet card. This leaves no room for an internal wireless networking card or a TV tuner, so you would have to buy external USB versions. The motherboard has integrated Intel 945G graphics, but there's only a VGA port, and no DVI or HDMI outputs. There's a PCI Express x16 slot for a dedicated graphics card, but a circuit board at the front of the case stops you fitting any graphics card longer than 210mm, which includes most cards capable of playing modern games.

At least it's easy to build. The drive tray and power supply swing out of the way of the motherboard, giving good access. The finished PC is quiet, and uses a reasonable 60W when idle. Its PCMark Vantage score of 3,042 was lower than we were expecting for our reference Core 2 Duo E8500 with 4GB of RAM, but this is because of the low power of the integrated graphics chipset. When we fitted a more powerful Radeon HD 3650 graphics card, the score jumped to 4,182.

Asus's T3-P5945GCX may have its faults, but it's a good-looking, easy-to-build and quiet barebones PC at a reasonable price.