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Aria’s Gladiator Proteus 550 is fitted with an AMD processor rather than an Intel model. Since AMD chips tend to be cheaper, this explains how the Proteus also manages to pack a 24in monitor, a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive for this price. Aria has also taken the unusual step of fitting a Wi-Fi card into the single PCI-E x1 slot, and it’s also unusual at this price in having a memory card reader.
Aria’s taste for the unusual starts with a generous 24in widescreen monitor from Edge10, a British company whose monitors we’ve been impressed with before. The M240 doesn’t have LED backlighting; the CCFL backlight is dull and has a strong blue cast to it which makes images seem colder than they should be. Controls are crude and fiddly and, as there’s no DVI cable in the box, you have to connect it via analogue VGA.
The Proteus 550’s Cooler Master case looks smart and is bristling with extras. On the front panel is a memory card reader that has slots for most cards, plus an extra USB port. The rear panel has the widest variety of ports that we’ve seen for a while, with four USB2 and two USB3 ports, plus single eSATA and FireWire ports. There’s 7.1 analogue outputs and an optical S/PDIF output.
Inside the case there’s plenty of room for expansion, with two free memory slots and plenty of drive bays. The Wi-Fi card fitted to the PCI-E x1 slot is a welcome inclusion if your router isn’t close by, but the Proteus 550 has a Gigabit Ethernet port as well. This still leaves one PCI slot and two PCI-E x16 slots; the 620W power supply should be able to handle a graphics card upgrade, but some longer graphics cards will require you to re-house the hard disk to create enough space.
If you were to add extra components, you will probably have to add another fan as well. The stock processor cooler becomes loud when the chip’s under load, and there’s only one case fan mounted behind the front panel.
AMD’s Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition may be slower than Intel’s Core chips, but it’s still fairly powerful, scoring 76 overall in our benchmarks. It scored 91 in the image-editing test, proving it’s quick in certain applications. It uses far more power than an Intel-based PC, however, drawing 92W when idle – as much as a Core i5 running at full tilt.
An AMD Radeon HD 4250 graphics processor provides meagre 3D oomph. It failed to run even our least-demanding game benchmark. It can play HD video though and, as it’s built into the motherboard, it doesn’t take up one of the two PCI-E x16 slots.
With Intel’s Core chips proving to be excellent value for money, it’s quite a gamble by Aria to opt for an AMD chip, and it hasn’t paid off. We like the two-year collect-and-return warranty, but the lower performance and higher power drain of the AMD processor don’t appeal. The 24in monitor is also disappointing and – if you want a big monitor – the Dino PC Jurassic 2500 comes with an excellent BenQ model and a fast Core i5 processor, albeit with only a return-to-base warranty.
