Upgrade options are present, if not pressing. The 250GB Hitachi Deskstar hard disk is enough for a decent music collection, plenty of digital photos and a couple of TV series, but the chassis has room for a further two disks – a mirrored RAID array would be a sensible addition to guard against data loss. The optical drive, hidden behind a swish pneumatic door, supports dual-layer writing at decent speeds too. There’s a 16x PCI Express slot free on the riser assembly. To usurp the Intel GMA900 graphics you’ll have to find a single-width card, but you’ll risk adding a lot more noise, as passive versions tend to be larger.
Unlike many of the more complex MCE systems, anyone with a decent knowledge of screwdrivers and fiddling could build this system for themselves for around the same as the asking price, but remember that you’re getting two years’ collect-and-return warranty and support included here. That includes a personal technical support contact, as well as SavRow’s excellent backup and recovery system that will perform both full and incremental backups and restore the factory image with ease should things go awry.
The use of a little more imagination to get rid of some of the compromises as well as a reduction in noise would have made the DLCS-100 an award contender, but it’s still a good-looking and well-featured system.
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