Smaller PC makers have been falling by the wayside for the past couple of years, unable to compete with the huge direct vendors. But ABS proves that David can coexist with Goliath and deliver a competitive product at an appealing price. The ABS Multimedia System 1 delivered very good performance and plenty of features for the money.

The tower case has a front panel sculpted in two-tone plastic, and the components inside show signs of careful assembly. Not only are there wraps on the loose cables, but the AGP graphics adapter is tied down by a loop of nylon monofilament, and there's a cooling fan on the graphics adapter's heat sink. Setup is fairly easy. One outstanding extra we encourage other vendors to copy: Every ABS system comes with a large three-ring binder with color-coded plastic pockets that hold all the disks and documentation for the system's various components. That makes it easy to find driver disks and component manuals when you need them.

Nice touches in the hardware bundle include the easily accessible audio jacks of the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! drive (mounted in one of the front bays), an impressive 19-inch ViewSonic monitor, and dual hard drives with a disk controller that supports RAID striping and disk mirroring. The pair of drives was configured for striping to give faster performance. The bundle also includes a batch of games, DVD decoding software, a pedestal microphone, and a variety of cables and adapters. The system also comes with DVD decoding software.

Business and gaming performance were very good; credit the 1.1-GHz Athlon processor, the GeForce2 GTS Ultra graphics subsystem, and the disk-striping configuration of the hard drives. As a development platform, the ABS entry is good but not stellar. Overall, the System 1 is a competitive performer, with some attractive extras.