High-End Multimedia for a High Price
Photograph: Marc SimonIf you're willing to pay big bucks, you can get a computer that pulls out all the multimedia stops. The HP Pavilion d4100e we evaluated supplies 660GB of hard-drive space, a 21-inch flat-panel monitor, and dual TV tuners. And it costs a whopping $3648--nearly $1500 more than the Shuttle XPC G5 8300mc.
So what do you get for your extra dough? For one, higher frame rates on video games. The d4100e we tested came with an Asus Extreme N6800 graphics card, and of our five Media Center PCs it consistently generated the highest frame rates; on the game Unreal Tournament, frame rates were significantly higher. However, both the Polywell and the Shuttle came in very close behind the HP d4100e on Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
The midsize-tower d4100e is quite expandable. It has six external drive bays and three internal drive bays, and two of each are open. All but one of the bargain PCs we tested lacked open bays; the Sony VCG-RC110G was the sole exception, offering four of them, one external. A nice touch on the d4100e is its 160GB removable hard drive, which slides into a bay on the front panel and gives the d4100e a total hard-drive capacity of 660GB. For $190 you can add this same removable drive to the HP m7260n, which has the same type of bay.
On everyday tasks, the d4100e performed well, earning a WorldBench 5 score of 102--but so did the $1888 Polywell, and both systems are Athlon-based. If you don't need the d4100e's extras--such as its 21-inch LCD--a more affordable system should fit the bill.
Eric Butterfield
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