Top 5 Entertainment PCs

Because most vendors' office and home PCs exhibit fewer and fewer differences these days, we've decided to merge our Top 15 Office PCs and Top 15 Home PCs charts to create a unified Top 15 Desktop PCs chart. Most of the systems appearing on the new chart are general-purpose home-office or small-office models. At the same time, though, we've created three new charts for specialized systems: Top 5 Entertainment PCs, Top 5 Corporate PCs, and Top 5 Under-$900 PCs; these new charts will rotate monthly.

Like contenders in a drag race, a flashy lineup of supercharged PCs vied for positions on our first entertainment PCs chart. But glamour does not guarantee a winner. Top honors go to the comparatively sedate-looking Gateway 700XL--the latest iteration of a model that has been at or near the top of our Office PCs and Home PCs charts in previous months. One of its finest points is an 18-inch LCD monitor that displayed photographs, DVD movies, and even games beautifully. Though most gamers still favor CRT monitors, this flat-panel contender held its own against the tube-based competition. In second place, the Xi Computer 4286 MTower is the least-expensive system on the chart, but it matched the competition in graphics performance and came very close in sound quality.

Entrants from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and Voodoo Computers--big names in the game PC business--finished behind the two frontrunners, mainly because of their high price tags. Alienware's $3125 Aurora DDR, the sole Athlon-based system, is the most affordable of the three. Originally reviewed in our October issue, it fended off a challenge from Falcon Northwest's new Mach V, which comes in a cool-looking aluminum case. An updated Alienware Area 51 with a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor also vied for a place on the chart; however, at nearly $1000 less, the Aurora DDR is a better deal.

The most striking system is the Voodoo Egad Obsidian Black, whose glossy metal case features a window into the meticulously ordered interior, illuminated by a fluorescent blue light. It also had the highest frame rates in nearly all our tests. But these positives don't justify spending nearly $6000. For that much money, you could buy both our number one and number two entertainment models (each of which has a higher PC WorldBench 4 score) and still have enough left over for a discount cross-country plane ticket.