PCs With Personality

From do-everything workhorses to entertainment specialists, the best new home PCs pack performance and pizzazz to spare.

The bland beige PC sitting on your home office desk is so 1989. These days, home computers are dressed in black, silver, and even bright blue, and their snazziness goes beyond appearance. Many of the latest PCs--with big LCD monitors, recordable DVD drives, and thundering speakers--can stand in as a one-stop entertainment system.

Today's turbo-charged home PCs make games and DVDs come alive, while less-powerful machines deliver good value and plenty of oomph for garden-variety productivity tasks.

We looked at ten systems ideal for the home user, divided into three categories: gaming, entertainment, and general-purpose productivity. PCs in each category have to meet baseline requirements--for example, you can't edit tape from your camcorder on a system that lacks the proper ports, and playing action games is no fun if the machine can't redraw the screen as fast as you can shoot. To test system performance, we ran our PC WorldBench 4 benchmark; we also blasted game sound tracks and music on their speakers, studied their screens for signs of stuttering while playing videos, and ferreted out useful ports.

We learned that you won't have to buy a separate system for each different use--all the PCs here have enough power to double or triple up on tasks, and they all have some capacity to receive upgrades.