Polywell Poly P5500B Mainstream Desktop PC

Feb 10 2010 - Polywell's Poly P5500B is a good general performance desktop system that doesn't really have much to distinguish it from other systems on the market. The case design is bland but functional as are most of the components. About the only standouts to the system are the Blu-ray compatible drive and the fact that the system doesn't come with a large amount of trialware like most major manufacturers. The performance lags behind others though with its Core i5 processor and it doesn't feature as many expansion ports.

Feb 10 2010 - Priced just at $1000, the Polywell Poly P5500B is the epitome of what a mainstream desktop is. It provides a moderate level of features at a price that bridges the gap between high end and budget class systems. It certainly isn't a bad system for someone looking at a bit more than a budget class system but it doesn't have much to set it apart from other offerings.

Quad core processors are pretty much the standard now for desktop systems in this price range. Polywell has decided to use a Core i5-750 quad core processor for the P5500B. This is certainly an advantage over the dual-core versions of the Core i5. The problem is that the processor is slower than the Core i7 processors that many of the competing systems in this price range use. It will offer a good level of performance for just about any type of application run on the system, it just will be slightly slower.

The one bright spot on the Poly P5500B is the fact that it comes with a Blu-ray compatible drive. This allows the system to playback high definition Blu-ray movies in addition to handling playback and recording of CDs and DVDs. This may be incentive for some but Blu-ray still hasn't exploded in terms of use just quite yet. The one terabyte hard drive is typical of desktop in this price range and provides a fair amount of storage for applications and media files.

Graphics for the Poly P5500B are handled by an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 graphics card with 1GB of memory. The card is essentially a reworked version of the venerable GeForce 9800 GT card and provides a decent level of graphics performance. Expect to be able to play games up to the 1680x1050 resolution without much problem. Some games will be able to go to higher resolution but filtering performance will be limited to lower resolutions.

One way that Polywell makes up for some of the blandness of the Poly P5500B desktop is the customization that they offer. Pretty much every component within the system can be changed between a variety of different options by the user to get a system more suited to their needs. Just be warned that most upgrades will increase the overall cost of the system.