The right speakers and sound card can turn your PC into an audio tour de force for games, DVDs, and music. Great sound can pump up a dull movie, as well as notch up your adrenaline when you battle bad guys.
We took an acoustical tour of five speaker sets and four sound cards, from the modestly priced to the top-of-the-line. And because many computers now come with integrated 5.1-channel audio (capable of driving five satellite speakers and a separate subwoofer), we added in an Amax AMD Max 3200+ system that has integrated NVidia NForce2 audio, to see how it stacked up against our four sound cards. (Read story "Audio Nirvana: Cards to Speakers".)
Photograph: Marc Simon
Your Guide to the Top 100
Each month, we test a large number of PCs, printers, monitors, and other products. Only the best products land on the charts, which are refreshed monthly.
Configurations are shown as tested. The overall rating for each product is calculated on a 100-point scale and reflects results from our hands-on evaluations and performance tests. A 90-point score is exceptional, while one in the 70s is above average.
For desktops and notebooks, the PC WorldBench 4 score is a measure of how fast a PC can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine, a Gateway Select 1200 with a 1.2-GHz Athlon processor, 128MB of PC133 SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. For example, a PC that scores 120 is 20 percent faster than the baseline system. The support policies score is based on vendor support policies (not shown on charts). Click here for additional details on how we compile charts for the Top 100.
Freelance writers Dan Littman, Mick Lockey, and Carla Thornton and PC World editors Eric Butterfield, Tracey Capen, Se
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