Top 15 Home PCs

Much has changed since November's Top 15 chart. We gathered all-new contenders for December's "Home PCs: All This and XP Too," and we've revised the way we test and rate systems. All of the PCs in this Top 15 run Windows XP, and we expect home vendors to phase out PCs with older versions of Windows in coming months.

We've also adjusted the mix of PCs, creating a near-even split of seven power systems and eight value machines. Our Best Buy value PC from last month, the NuTrend Athlon Mega 3, retains the top spot. However, a late shakeup just before we went to press realigned our power chart. The Dell Dimension 8200 received a Best Buy in December, but Dell told us it would no longer sell the 2-GHz Pentium 4 model we tested because the company could not get parts for it. As a result, the power Best Buy goes to ABS's new, lightning-fast Performance 1. Also debuting are Sony's stylish VAIO PCV-RX580 on the power side and HP's feature-rich Pavilion 7965, a value unit. Another newcomer, Gateway's shoebox-size 300X, missed the chart due to its ho-hum performance. Compaq's Presario 5000Z drops out because Compaq is revising its entire Presario line.

We're now speed-testing systems on our new benchmark, PC WorldBench 4, and we've updated our subjective testing criteria for items like monitor and speaker quality. For monitors, we use a subset of our current Top 10 Monitors tests, plus a high-action scene from the movie Gladiator. Finally, we've revamped our video game testing, replacing the frames-per-second scores with our testers' assessments of image quality and the smoothness of game play.