iBUYPOWER has certainly put together a very affordable system for casual gaming, but the choice of components is somewhat limiting to those looking for a higher performance general purpose computer or for more intense gaming. The processor is certainly the most limiting component out of the entire system as it is an older AMD Athlon X2. The dedicated graphics card does make gaming possible, just with limited resolutions and detail. At least the larger 480W power supply allows for a higher end graphics card to be installed.

Whoops, actually the Athlon X2 7750 is a Phenom with two cores disabled. So much for research. And from our story earlier today you may be able to unlock those cores.

Playing back a Blu-ray disc shows that the CPU cores drop to about 40/41 deg C and the motherboard drops to 50 deg C after an hour of disc playback; nice and cool. But if running things below stock speed doesn’t tickle your fancy, then we reset the voltages and core speed to defaults and play the movie again. This time CPU temperatures jumped by 10 deg C up to 50/51 and the motherboard sensor (still no idea where it is) up around 58 deg C.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, predicted the combination will create a "systems and software powerhouse" that "redefines the industry, redrawing the boundaries that have frustrated the industry's ability to solve." Among other things, he predicted Oracle will be able to offer its customers simpler computing solutions at less expensive prices by drawing upon Sun's technology.

The hardware of this system is well-chosen, including 4GB of memory and a quad-core Phenom II X4 920 processor running at 2.8GHz. The four cores will help speed things up in multithreaded apps like video editors, and the processor otherwise has more than enough computing muscle for productivity tasks. And while the 750GB Seagate hard drive isn’t huge by today’s standards, it’s spacious for a system at this price. The Asus M3a78-EM motherboard has a plethora of video-connectivity options, including VGA, DVI, HDMI, and even DisplayPort, meaning that this system should be able to easily connect to just about any HDTV or monitor. Considering the LG Blu-ray drive is one of this system’s major selling points, that’s a very good thing. The eight-channel audio is also a nice touch. If you don’t mind its decidedly desktop-PC looks and size, this system could serve as a capable Windows Media Center PC.

BenQ stuck a Yukon spec motherboard in an 18.5-inch screen chassis, and voila, the nScreen i91 was born. It's powered by AMD's Sempron U210 at 1.5GHz and M690E chipset with Radeon X1200 IGP. Although it's not an Intel machine, it's still subject to Microsoft's restrictions, hence the biggest hard drive you can get with XP is a 160GB unit, while you can get 250GB of storage if you go for Linux. There is also an SSD option, although we don't think there will be many takers, as it's not a netbook. The restrictions also affect the amount of RAM, which is limited to 1GB for the XP SKU, and 2GB for the Linux based version, although both the hard drive and memory can be easily upgraded.

You can find the product page here.