Top 20 Budget Desktops

SUMMARY

Sys TaskMaster 366C PRO: Inexpensive, good performance for a Celeron-366 PC, comprehensive support policies CON: Smallish hard drive, graphics board from little-known vendor, no system manual

The Sys TaskMaster 366C ranks highest among the four Celeron-366­equipped systems we reviewed this month. With this no-nonsense PC you get all the basics you need for standard office work, without a fancy price tag. Just don't expect top-of-the-line components.

A PC WorldBench 98 score of 193 makes the $1399 TaskMaster the fastest Celeron-366­based PC we've tested, with a level of performance that falls roughly midway between what you'd get with a Pentium II-350 system and a PII-400 system with 64MB of RAM. Unfortunately, many other components can't command such high praise. For starters, the 6.4GB hard drive is small, even by budget PC standards. The Eon Lilith Banshee graphics card uses a 3Dfx Banshee chip­-one of the stronger pieces of graphics silicon around--but the board itself hails from a vendor with no established track record. It ports images to a 17-inch Shamrock monitor, which delivers very crisp images marred by somewhat washed-out color.

The TaskMaster bundles good Altec Lansing ACS295 speakers with a sizable subwoofer. You'll need a screwdriver to remove two small screws; but otherwise, popping open the nondescript midtower case to add components is an easy enough task, and the interior is fairly tidy. Annoyingly, however, Sys does not provide a comprehensive system manual for troubleshooting, although the company does offer users nonstop toll-free support for the first year (after that, support drops to a less impressive nine hours per day) and free on-site service to accompany a three-year warranty on parts (six years on the CPU and main RAM) and five-year coverage for labor.