Available in three different colours – ‘Starry Silver’, ‘Midnight Black’ and ‘Ocean Blue’ – the rear of the camera sports a generously large, glossy black LCD monitor measuring 3-inches as well as unusual clear block buttons and a shooting mode dial.

The LCD screen pretty much fills most of the rear of the camera body, leaving the buttons sitting to the far right, just underneath your thumb. At first glance it looks like the controls are a little squashed, but the nature of the clear block buttons means that it’s easy enough to adjust settings with the flat of your thumb rather than poke around with the tip, so this is no problem.

The control dial that sits just underneath the 7x optical zoom control buttons gives you the chance to quickly choose between basic or more advanced Auto Mode, Video, Playback, Scene and Beauty. Some of the options, including Beauty (a capture mode designed to smooth skin) have an intro animation before they kick-start into action and process the shot. While this adds an element of fun to the operation of the camera, if you’re in a hurry it can be a little annoying.

Modes such as Playback present your image preview with an animated slideshow effect, and if you go to delete an image you’re shown an animation of your shot falling into a trash can. This could equally be regarded as being a little gimmicky, but, in respect to the ‘delete’ option, it’s actually a great way of making the user sit up and take notice: perfect for restricting the danger of accidentally wiping a shot.

When it comes to scene modes, the Olympus mju-7000 offers all the usual choices; these include Self-Portrait, Landscape and Indoor. It also boasts a Smile Shot function (a popular shooting mode that seems to be popping up on an awful lot of new compact cameras including our recently reviewed Pentax P70). Once the camera detects smiling faces it automatically fires the shutter button.

Unfortunately, as the responses were a little slow we found that some group portrait shots taken indoors weren’t that successful. Multiple flashes tricked our subjects into thinking the photo had been taken, when in fact the camera was simple firing pre-shutter flashes. This meant that by the time the shot was actually captured some faces looked more bemused than beaming.

The directional control pad features an Exposure Compensation setting that allows you to easily adjust the brightness of your shots. Instead of simply providing you with a +/- figure, small thumbnails appear on the LCD monitor showing you the effect that a change in Exposure Compensation will have. This sounds great and it’s a nice gesture, but in reality unless you are very observant you won’t notice much difference in choice.

Just below this you will find the options for adjusting your flash, self-timer and macro settings. As well as a standard Macro mode the Olympus µ 7000 also has a Super Macro mode which allows close focussing up to 6.6mm. The quality of the Super Macro mode is impressive and the camera had no problems finding focus points quickly and effectively.

Generally, picture quality on the Olympus µ 7000 is good, although in Auto mode most of the shots did seem a little lifeless and dreary and needed a bit of a tweak in Photoshop to give them more contrast. There’s no denying that it manages to pick up lots of detail, but it’s worth taking the time to experiment with camera settings. Although the µ 7000 has a good ISO range (Auto, High ISO Auto, ISO 64-1600), on basic Auto settings the camera did seem to overcompensate a little. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t cope well with noise levels on the higher ISO settings.

On the upside, however, is the standard of portraits taken in Beauty mode. Without over-softening, the µ 7000 manages to smooth out blemishes and avoid losing too much detail.

The new Core i7 CPUs are all quad core with Hyperthreading, which means that the OS and some software will see eight cores. Whether they can use all eight is a different matter but they are there, and with the X58 supporting tri-channel DDR3 memory you can have huge amounts of bandwidth. This makes it ideal for building very fast and capable gaming machines or workstations.

Anyway, back to the Vortex. Our review system came with the current flagship of the i7 line-up, the 965 Extreme, which has all four cores clocked at 3.2GHz. As mentioned above you could save some money here as PC Specialist offers all three current Core i7 chips as options, the others being the i7-920 (2.66GHz) and the i940 (2.93GHz). Whichever you choose it will come sitting in an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard.

Again, you have options when it comes to memory configurations, our review system being equipped with three 2GB modules of fast 1600MHz Corsair XMS3 DDR3 memory in three of the six DIMM slots. You can opt for 3, 6 or 12GB of slower 1333MHz DDR3 or add another 6GB of the faster 1600MHz memory to reach the motherboard’s capacity of 12GB.

To give you an idea of the performance the new technology offers, our review sample Vortex gave a PCM05 score of 12,690; far and away the fastest we have ever tested.You also have plenty of options when it comes to which graphics card(s) you want, as one of the highlights of the X58 is that it supports both ATI’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI techniques so whichever camp you favour, PC Specialist has an option for you.

The system supplied to us had a pair of ATI Radeon HD4870 X2s setup in a Crossfire configuration so along with the four CPU cores you have four GPU cores. Once again the Vortex outshines anything we’ve had on the bench with a 3DMark06 score of 23,500. But maybe of more importance to some people is that by using a pair of HD4870 X2s you will have support for up to four monitors – Flight Sim anyone?

For storage our Vortex came with a blisteringly fast 150GB Western Digital Western Velociraptor drive just for the Vista Home Premium 64-bit OS and applications, and a second 1TB Samsung drive for all data, photographs, etc. Again there is a multitude of storage options including RAID arrays which will come in handy if you see the Vortex as an ideal entry level workstation.

If, however, you fancy using your Vortex as a video editing system then there is an LG Blu-ray and DVD-RW drive, which supports Lightscribe technology.

There’s plenty of power for all this lot in the shape of a 1,200W (yes that’s 1.2KW) power supply and all this hardware is neatly built into one of Coolermaster’s massive Cosmos 1000 cases. Despite the number of case fans and general hardware cooling fans, the Vortex is remarkably quiet.