Top 15 Office PCs

Starting this month, we are combining the power and value PC charts to give you all the information on business desktops that you need in one place: A single chart now tracks seven power and eight value PCs.

This month also sees the debut of our new benchmarking application, PC WorldBench 4. We updated the application so that it provides an even better measurement of today's remarkably powerful personal computers by timing a variety of real-world tasks in common programs. Note that the results produced by PC WorldBench 4 are not comparable with the results produced for previous issues by PC WorldBench 2000; we have retested all of the machines we reviewed over the past few months.

Last month's Best Buy, the Dell Dimension 8200, is no longer on the chart: Dell claims to be having supply problems and has discontinued the 2-GHz version of this system. That leaves the top spot open for the Polywell Poly 815TS-1260, which uses a 1260-MHz Intel Pentium III-S CPU.

Debuting on the chart this month is the Gateway 700CB Deluxe. Based on a 2-GHz Pentium 4 processor, this system achieved a score of 119 in our new PC WorldBench 4 tests. It's packed with features--such as a fast ATI Radeon graphics card--for a reasonable price of $2287.

The value chart has several new entries. The ABS Conquest VP comes in at number two with a strong combination of features and performance for $1199. The Sys TaskMaster 1000D (which uses AMD's new 1-GHz Duron processor) captures fourth place, while the Compaq Evo 500 and the Gateway E-3600 enter the chart at number five and number six, respectively. Both offer a wide range of corporate features such as remote manageability and a case design that allows you to remove and insert drives without using tools.

Several new systems fell short this month. The Sys Performance 2000 received a score of 117 in our PC WorldBench 4 tests, but its $2419 price helped keep it off the power chart. And though the Xi 1800+ MTower (with AMD's new Athlon XP 1800+ processor) earned a respectable PC WorldBench 4 score of 120, its very high price of $2999 caused it to miss the power chart as well.