Power to the People

There's no place like home for PCs. Once considered corporate systems' little siblings, home PCs have grown up: These machines now match or exceed their business cousins' performance and outpace their sales. As vendors battle for the home market, low prices put undreamed-of speed and capacity within reach of even the most budget-conscious PC buyers.

What to choose? We scoured the shelves and searched the online stores to find the best home bargains this year. Whether you're pinching pennies so you can afford a second PC or are ready to drop a bundle on a high-powered home office system or a muscle machine for gaming, you'll find what you're looking for here.

Fast and Luxurious

Home PCs passed the millennium mark in 2000: Every system in this year's power lineup runs at 1000 MHz or faster. Polywell's Poly 830KR, propelled by an Athlon-1000 CPU, grabbed top speed honors with a score of 167 on our PC WorldBench 2000 tests. But Gateway's Select 1100 Deluxe, with its Athlon-1100 CPU, and Sony's VAIO Digital Studio RX280DS, featuring a Pentium III-1000, tied for second just three points behind. All five power systems also have state-of-the-art graphics cards equipped with the NVidia GeForce2 chip set and either 32MB or 64MB of video RAM.

Performance should continue to go up in coming months, as AMD introduces 1.2-GHz Athlon chips that work with doubly fast DDR RAM. Rival Intel is also betting on higher performance with its upcoming 1.4- and 1.5-GHz Pentium 4 processors.

You'll see plenty of speed in this month's midrange PCs, and in the budget category as well, where AMD's zippy Duron processor stands out among its low-cost peers. The Duron is AMD's answer to Intel's Celeron CPU, and in our tests the 700-MHz Durons put their Celeron counterparts to shame. Two Duron-based systems, NuTrend's Duron Power 2 and Polywell's Poly 700KD, outran our Best Buy, the Celeron-700-based HP Pavilion XE763, by more than 25 percent on our PC WorldBench 2000 tests. (At a mere $899, however, the Pavilion still captures top honors for overall value.)

This year, 17-inch monitors have become the standard for home systems, and many power and midrange PCs ramp up to 19-inch displays. Only one system, HP's budget Pavilion XE763, comes with a 15-inch model, though a very high quality one. Likewise, DVD-ROM drives are almost ubiquitous: Only the low-end Kaypro 4100 and Polywell's high-end Poly 830KR lack them. Polywell compensates by equipping the 830KR with a CD-RW drive and two high-speed 30GB SCSI hard drives in a RAID configuration--an ideal setup for very demanding power applications like digital video editing.

Don't Forget Support

At home, no IT technician can hear you scream. So when you buy a home PC, remember that you're buying the company's service as well as its hardware.

Neither the power Best Buy, Dell's Dimension XPS B1000r, nor the midrange Best Buy, the Dimension 4100 PIII-800, is the fastest system in its class. But both are solidly built machines from a company that has consistently received top marks for reliability and support in our Reliability and Service survey of PC World readers. Watch for the results of our latest survey in next month's issue of PC World.

Contributing Editor Kirk Steers regularly covers home systems for PC World.