Ultimate Buyers Guide: Home PCs

Some of today's PCs will not only help you tally your credit card bills and design your smashing Web site, they'll also handsomely accentuate your home office. Thanks to a wave of snazzy and luscious boxes, you can choose from a number of offbeat machines, such as IBM's Aptiva S Series 865, NEC's all-in-one Z1, and the Emachines EOne--a PC that looks so much like the iMac that Apple filed a lawsuit. Of the three, only the pricey, relatively slow Z1 failed to crack our Top 15.

In this roundup, we put 25 of the latest systems through a battery of hands-on and real-world performance tests. We rank the best of these in our newly updated Top 15 Home PCs chart. Taking a cue from the Top 10 desktop PC charts, which focus on computers for businesses, we've divided the home PCs section into three categories: power (machines that cost $2000 and up); midrange ($1200 to $1999); and budget (under $1200).

While most models here offer an appealing blend of speed, hardware, and price, one system in each category stands out. And though we looked at some jazzy PCs, the top choices still come in beige wrappers. Our power Best Buy, the Dell Dimension XPS T600, is one such unit that puts substance ahead of style. Its boring box packs such top features as a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra graphics card, an 8X DVD-ROM drive, and a 250MB Zip drive.

Another Dell, the Dimension XPS T500, takes top honors on the midrange chart with good performance, easy setup, and a bundled 100MB Zip drive.

A Micron gets the spotlight in the budget category. The Millennia C466 is the fastest budget home PC we've seen, and its handy keyboard has a volume control and customizable buttons.

"Slow home computer" is getting to be an oxymoron. Two Athlon-based systems on our power chart, IBM's Aptiva S Series 865 and Compaq's Presario 5861, establish new PC WorldBench performance 98 records for systems running Windows 98. Most power PCs also boast huge hard drives, blazing 3D graphics, 17- or 19-inch monitors, and more RAM than you'll probably ever need. So if you work with formula-laden spreadsheets, large multimedia files, or high-resolution graphics--or if you just want to play the hottest computer games--consider buying one of the systems on our power chart.

Some midrange PCs we reviewed also offer more than enough speed for running office applications and playing games, though they tend to have slightly slower 450- to 500-MHz processors and smaller hard drives.

The five budget systems on our chart come with fewer features, but they're perfectly adequate for day-to-day tasks such as Web browsing and word processing. Most come with a 400 MHz or faster Intel Celeron processor and have a bare-bones configuration: half the system memory of midrange and power systems, a dinky 15-inch monitor, a small hard drive, and integrated graphics. Because most budget systems lack an AGP slot, you'll have to buy a PCI graphics card if you want better graphics or 3D-gaming performance. All things considered, budget machines are ideal for those who are looking for a low-cost family system or a second, basic PC.

Whether you're buying a top-of-the-line system as a holiday gift or seeking a more modest system that'll help you track your bills without doubling them, our comprehensive review of the best home PCs will help you find the right one for your needs, and hopefully shave a few hours off of your shopping time.