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You need not be a serious PC gamer to benefit from the performance boost that a power system offers. For this Top 5 chart, we tested eight high-performance PCs, ranging in price from just over $2000 to almost $4400. All of them ran Windows Vista and had an Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme processor.

The CyberPower Gamer Infinity Ultimate ($4399) earned our Best Buy nod despite its price, thanks to its excellent performance and extensive features. This PC--with its Core 2 Extreme CPU overclocked to 3.46 GHz--earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 129, the highest of the group. The unit carries 800GB of hard-drive space and a Blu-ray drive (it's the only one of the bunch to do so). No other system we tested has PCI Express-SLI graphics; the rest--including Xi's MTower IGE-SLI, with its SLI-capable motherboard--had single graphics cards.

If you're on a much tighter budget, or you aren't a hard-core gamer, you might consider the $2033 Dell XPS 410, the least-expensive system we tested. Its thorough documentation makes it easy to set up, but it had just one open external bay in the configuration we tested, and it lacked an unoccupied internal bay. All of the other desktops we tested had at least three expansion bays, except the Shuttle XPC P2 3900g, which failed to make our chart. The very compact Shuttle (about the size of two stacked shoe boxes) left room for just a single open bay, but the tiny case gives it a good excuse. Nevertheless, in our performance tests, it needed no apology, earning a strong WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 114 and a Superior mark for its high gaming frame rates. But the little dynamo costs $4301--almost as much as the full-featured CyberPower gaming system we tested.

If you don't need all the features the CyberPower offers, you might like the Xi MTower IGE-SLI. This machine posted a fantastic score of 127 in our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 tests, and it maintained extremely high frame rates in our graphics tests. At $3655, it costs significantly less than the CyberPower. An even less expensive alternative is the $2399 Velocity Micro ProMagix PCX, a PC whose Asus P5N-E motherboard supports both SLI and RAID for later upgrades.

WorldBench 6 Beta 2

This month we used the Beta 2 version of our new benchmark, WorldBench 6, to test each new system. Because many of the applications included in WorldBench do not yet run properly on Windows Vista, we used older versions of some applications and we omitted others. Once all of these applications run properly on Vista, we'll retest with the final benchmark.

Eric Butterfield