Why You Can Trust CNET Polywell Poly 939N4X2 review: Polywell Poly 939N4X2
If you need to archive digital video, feel free to hit your Back button now. Otherwise, check out the Polywell Poly 939N4X2. It's a fast, overachieving computer and an outstanding deal.
Polywell's $2,656 Poly 939N4X2 single-3D-card configuration can't match the performance of the latest overclocked SLI powerhouses, but it comes darn close. A true overachiever, the Poly 939N4X2 scores well due to the vendor's old-school hard drive-formatting choice, which trades features for performance. If you traffic in large data files, we don't recommend the Poly 939N4X2, but if you're looking for a fast gaming box at a great price, this unassuming PC fits the bill.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Our review system came housed in a modest black-and-silver midtower case, but Polywell offers several chassis designs and color choices if you want to jazz things up. The Evercase 4292 enclosure we received is relatively tool free. You can remove the side panel by depressing two tabs, and the drive bays all have quick-release mechanisms, although the drives came screwed in for secure shipping. Expansion-board installation and removal also requires a screwdriver. Polywell's technicians tried to organize the cables inside, but their efforts fell short of the craftsmanship we've seen from companies such as Alienware and Velocity Micro. Worse, we found the Polywell noisy, despite its supposedly quiet 120mm exhaust fan.
The Poly 939N4X2 comes with a full complement of removable storage devices, including a double-layer DVD burner, a DVD-ROM drive, and a media-card reader/floppy drive combo. The system also gives the average user plenty of flexibility for upgrading and adding peripherals. The front panel has room for one more 3.5-inch drive and three additional 5.25-inch drives, but both hard drive bays are occupied. With three PCI and two memory slots available, you still get plenty of upgrade potential. Two x1 PCI Express (PCIe) slots are also open for future use. Two USB 2.0 and two FireWire ports sit on the lower front of the case along with microphone and headphone jacks. At the rear of the system, you'll find four more USB 2.0 ports, jacks for the integrated eight-channel audio, and a Gigabit Ethernet port.
Our Polywell Poly 939N4X2 test system uses a ChainTech VNF4 motherboard based on Nvidia's Nforce-4 chipset with AMD's dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200+, a 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card running on the x16 PCIe bus, and 1GB of 400MHz SDRAM--a powerful, if not over-the-top combination of hardware. If you're worried because the X2 4200+ processor is only AMD's fourth-fastest dual-core CPU, don't be. Polywell's FAT32 hard drive formatting helps the make up for any clock-speed shortcomings in the chip. There are trade-offs, however, to using FAT32.
The two 74GB, 10,000rpm Western Digital hard drives in the Polywell Poly 939N4X2 are already primed for speed, regardless of format. But because Polywell uses the lean FAT32 file system and a small 19GB main C: partition, the Poly 939N4X2 can access data faster than it could using the more feature-rich NTFS. Digital-media mavens, especially those involved with digital video, will want a system formatted with NTFS, which provides features such as metadata searching and imposes no limits on file size beyond the capacity of the hard drive itself (FAT32 limits you to individual files that are 4GB and smaller). Gamers, however, will love the speed FAT32 brings, as well as the value.
The Polywell Poly 939N4X2 ran 4 percent faster than the Alienware Aurora 7500 on CNET Labs' BAPCo SysMark 2004 benchmark. That's a small difference, to be sure, but considering that the Aurora 7500 costs $1,000 more than the Poly 939N4X2 and has a theoretically faster AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU, the benefit of using FAT32 becomes clear. Similarly, our Half-Life 2 test reveals that the Polywell and its single Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 3D card can even beat out a system as powerful as the ABS Ultimate X8, which uses two identical 3D cards and Intel's current top-of-the-line chip, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The Poly 939N4X2 also fared well on our multimedia tests, scoring among the best of a number of recent high-end dual-core CPU systems on our iTunes and PhotoShop benchmarks. We attribute the Poly 939N4X2's slower video-encoding times to the system's slower-clocked CPU.
Included in the Polywell Poly 939N4X2's price is the decent 19-inch Avidav M1901D LCD monitor, an analog- and DVI-capable display with a quick 12ms pixel-response rating. The display is bright and its color reproduction adequate, but gamers and video buffs will likely require a faster LCD or a CRT monitor. Fortunately, you can configure your system on Polywell's site; the company offers a huge selection of monitors. Instead of saddling us with the Avidav monitor's cheesy built-in speakers, our test system included Creative's Inspire P7800 7.1 speaker system, a compact but powerful 90-watt ensemble. Rounding out the package is a Logitech Internet Cordless Desktop, which includes a wireless multimedia keyboard and an optical scroll mouse.
In addition to the Windows XP Professional operating system and NTI's DVDRW Maker software for disc burning, the Poly 939N4X2 comes with a ChainTech Value Pack disc with Adobe Photoshop Album SE, Norton AntiVirus 2005, and a handful of system-restoration and backup utilities.
Supporting documentation for the Polywell Poly 939N4X2 is sparse. The system came with a setup guide specific to this model; however, it did not exactly match the system and offered little help on setting up the PC other than a few pictures showing the front, the side, and the rear of the machine. A motherboard manual with the front and back covers torn off was also in the box. Polywell covers the Poly 939N4X2 with a generous five-year-labor and three-year-parts warranty, but onsite service will cost an extra $75 per year. Polywell provides toll-free 24/7 telephone support for the first year of the warranty; after that, support is limited to Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET, plus Saturdays by appointment for the remainder of the warranty period.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | BAPCo's SysMark 2004 rating | | BAPCo's SysMark 2004 Internet-content-creation rating | | BAPCo's SysMark 2004 office-productivity rating |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| Half-Life 2 1,024x768 4XAA 8XAF | | Half-Life 2 1,600x1,200 4XAA 8XAF |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| Sorenson Squeeze 4.0 video-encoding test (in seconds) | | Adobe Photoshop CS test (in seconds) | | Apple iTunes 4.7.1.30 MP3-encoding test (in seconds) |
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations:
ABS Ultimate X8
Windows XP Professional SP2; 3.2GHz Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840; Nvidia Nforce-4 SLI Intel Edition chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; (2) 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX (PCIe SLI); two WDC WD740GD-00FLA2 74GB Serial ATA 10,000rpm; Hitachi HDS724040KLSA80 400GB SATA 7,200rpm; integrated Nvidia Nforce-4 Intel Edition Serial ATA RAID controller
Alienware Aurora 7500
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.4GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+; Nvidia Nforce-4 SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; (2) 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX (PCIe SLI); two Hitachi HDS728080PLA380 80GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Nvidia Nforce RAID-class controller (RAID 0)
Dell Dimension 9100
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP2; 3.2GHz Intel Pentium D 840; Intel 945GP chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 (PCIe); two WDC WD160JD-75HBB0 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Intel 82801GR/GH Serial ATA RAID controller (RAID 0)
Gateway FX400X
Windows XP Professional SP2; 3.0GHz Intel Pentium D 830; Intel 945GP chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 (PCIe); Hitachi HDS722525VLSA80 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA (two separate drives, no RAID)
Polywell Poly 939N4X2
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+; Nvidia Nforce-4 chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX (PCIe); two WDC WD740GD-00FLA2 74GB 10,000rpm Serial ATA; integrated Nvidia Nforce RAID-class controller (RAID 0)