Top 15 Home PCs

New Dell and Gateway systems do well on this month's power chart. With a PC WorldBench 4 score of 113, the Dell Dimension 8200 is slower than most other ranked power systems. But it won the Best Buy award anyway, thanks in part to its rich entertainment offerings--a ground-shaking sound system and some of the best game play and DVD movie playback we've seen. Meanwhile, Gateway's 700XL, scoring 118 on PC WorldBench 4, held its own with all but the fastest Athlon-based systems.

Dell and Gateway newcomers make a weaker showing on the value chart. Dell's Dimension 4400 takes third place behind our long-reigning champ, the NuTrend Athlon Mega 3, and Polywell's quick, new Poly 880NF. Two spots down, Gateway's well-appointed 500XL takes fifth place.

The Falcon Northwest Mach V's price looks $561 higher this month, but Falcon gave us the wrong figure for our March issue. The company says it will honor the originally quoted price of $4095 for anyone who mentions seeing it in PC World.

Farewell, SDRAM?

The Dell Dimension 4400 and the Gateway 500XL use Intel's revised 845 chip set to unite a Pentium 4 processor with low-cost, high-performance DDR SDRAM memory. Going forward, we expect DDR to continue to gain ground on older PC133 SDRAM. For instance, the Dell Dimension 4300 and the HP Pavilion 7966 dropped off the value chart this month because Dell and HP are replacing them with Pentium 4 models using DDR. PC133 remains a bit cheaper, however, and it will still be found on bargain-priced P4 systems, as well as on PCs with Celeron or Pentium III processors.