Top 15 Office PCs

Polywell and Sys Technology win new power chart positions with AMD's latest processor, the 1.67-GHz Athlon XP 2000+. Both systems make a good showing on PC WorldBench 4, with scores only a point or two behind that of the current speed leader on our chart, the Micro Express MicroFlex 1900A (which uses AMD's next-fastest CPU). The Sys comes with handy extras, including a speedy CD-RW drive, USB 2.0 ports for fast connections to the newest external drives, and a unique floppy drive with built-in slots for reading CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards. A Caliber Alps DT 1310i with Intel's latest processor, the 2.2-GHz Pentium 4, just missed the chart, as did a Premio Apollo 850R with a 2-GHz Pentium 4 chip.

Things move around a bit more on our value chart, with two newcomers from Gateway joining the ranks. Our Best Buy, the Gateway 300X, impressed us with a 15-inch LCD monitor and respectable performance wrung from Intel's latest Celeron processor. In addition to its 1.3-GHz clock speed, the chip benefits from a .13-micron design that allows Intel to double the L2 cache size to 256KB.

At number five, Gateway's E-1800 packs management and security features for corporate offices. A Polywell Poly 880NF nearly made the chart, and a Compaq Evo D300v missed by a wider margin, partly due to sluggish performance.

Finally, some chart rankings have changed because of modified weightings that focus a bit more on extra features and price. We made these adjustments because minor differences in speed are difficult for most users to discern, but a richer feature set or a lower price is easy for anyone to appreciate.