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Which PC Do You Need?

One computer doesn't fit all. We look at systems for the office, the home, and the road to help you find the right machine.

Roy Santos

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What About the Beige Box?

Sometimes, you just need a basic system without all the flash. The beige box is still holding tenaciously to its place in offices and homes. But "beige box" is now just a convenient term for a system that is in fact no longer beige--many PCs of this type are modern-looking machines updated with industrial grays, purples, and even metallic hues. Nevertheless, they are sometimes hard to distinguish from one another.

Click here to view full-size image.

Photograph: Marc Simon
We discovered, though, that some supposedly boring-looking systems blur the line between beige-box units and gaming PCs. We put two outwardly straitlaced systems--a Dell Dimension 8300 and an HP Pavilion A450e--through our tests, and found that each delivers performance more than adequate for gaming or other graphics-intensive tasks.

Using a 3.2E-GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1GB of RAM, the Dell Dimension 8300 earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 128--a mark 3 points faster than the average score of similarly configured systems. In our graphics tests, it turned in frame rates comparable to those of the towers, making it a good PC for gaming.

The HP Pavilion A450e also performed well overall, notching a score of 124 in our benchmark. However, it lagged slightly behind the Dell on our graphics tests.

Systems like the Dell and the HP offer almost as much potential for expansion as some of the huge towers do. The Dell offers a good number of available slots and bays. To open the case, you simply press buttons on the top and bottom, and the system opens like a clamshell.

The Dell's drive bays have large green clips that hold the drives in place and allow for their removal without tools--a feature that even our high-end tower systems don't offer. The cables are neatly arranged, though not as well as those in the Alienware. Removing and adding memory required little effort.

The HP model was more challenging to open--we had to remove a few screws and take off the side panel. Adding memory to the HP is easy, but it has fewer expansion slots and bays than the Dell.

Ultimately, systems such as the Dell and the HP are great alternatives to a tower PC--they run fast, use many of the same components, and cost less. The Dell costs $2779--over $1100 less than the Alienware and more than $900 below the Cyberpower--and the HP checks in at $1730. Not a bad deal when you can save money and still have both speedy performance and room for upgrades.

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