One PC, Two Brains

Good Deals

The systems we looked at for this review can't compete with costly, decked-out high-end models, but they do provide a great package for your money. All six had at least 250GB of storage, with two offering striped RAID arrays. All had double-layer DVD burners and, in three cases, a DVD-ROM drive as well. CyberPower's gaming machine even had SLI graphics, in the form of twin eVGA e-GeForce 7600 GT cards. Not surprisingly, it was the top performer on our gaming tests.

Polywell's MiniBox 939NP-4200, which used a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor, turned in the best performance of the group, with a WorldBench 5 score of 110. That's fast, but far from the speediest system we've tested (the $4199 Xi Computer MTower 64 AGL-SLI, a machine on our Top 10 Power Desktops chart with a 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 X2 FX-60 CPU, scored 142).

For details on each machine, see the full reviews linked below.

• HP Pavilion Media Center m7490n
• Dell Dimension E510
• Gateway FX510XL
• Ajump NBP1005
• CyberPower Gamer Ultra 8500SE
• Polywell MiniBox 939NP-4200

In reviewing the test results, we noted that at this price point the Intel-based machines closely matched the AMD-powered systems in performance. The two companies' dual-core processors are still quite different, though; for more information about the varying architecture, see "Dueling Dual-Core CPU Architectures." For this story we also examined a dual-core iMac, and we report our findings in "Core Duo-Based iMac Packs Lots of Power." Finally, to find out how the technology is affecting mobile PCs, we looked at a dual-core laptop; turn to "Notebooks Get a Boost From Dual-Core Processors" for more on how portables are changing.