Desktops: Fast, Furious, and Affordable

Diminutive Systems for Small Spaces

Whether you're trying to save real estate on your desk, or you just want a cool-looking conversation piece, there are several styles of ultracompact desktop systems to choose from. Some are barely bigger than an external, full-size optical drive, while others resemble a short stack of textbooks, with a handle on top. The trade-off in using a small-size PC is what you can't stuff in the box. Say so long to multiple optical drives and hard drives (those extras will have to hang outside your PC on USB cables). But given the proliferation of massive hard drives, multiformat optical writers, and ever-improving integrated sound and graphics, you can still get plenty of function in a small form.

The machines in Stealth Computer's Little PC line are among the smallest we've seen. The LPC-401 is just 10 by 5.8 by 2.9 inches--barely bigger than two external 5.25-inch optical drives on top of one another. We were not greatly impressed with this model when we tested it six months ago: Its performance was hampered by a relatively slow notebook hard drive and integrated 2D graphics. However, a new model, the LPC-401P, adds a faster CPU (a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4), a PC Card slot, a 120GB hard drive, and an 8X/8X/24X CD-RW drive. Those upgrades bumped the price up nearly a grand to $2080, but the aluminum chassis's dimensions remain unchanged.

If you're willing to go a little larger--about the size of two shoe boxes--companies like ABS and Amax sell systems with more powerful motherboards and higher-end components (such as a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU; a 200GB, 3.5-inch hard drive; and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro-based graphics). Amax also sells partially assembled units that include the heat sink, the motherboard, and the power supply--you add the hard drive, the optical drive, and the operating system. Like the Stealth PCs, these machines offer little internal expandability, but they're powerful enough for most apps and look very cool sitting on a desktop.

Melissa J. Perenson