Desktops: Fast, Furious, and Affordable
Pundits predicting the demise of the humble PC should return to their Ouija boards and reconsider their predictions. Computers--especially in the home--are capable of doing more than ever before.
Mick Lockey
Diminutive Systems for Small Spaces
The machines in Stealth Computer's Little PC line are among the smallest we've seen. The LPC-401 is just 10 by 5.8 by 2.9 inches--barely bigger than two external 5.25-inch optical drives on top of one another. We were not greatly impressed with this model when we tested it six months ago: Its performance was hampered by a relatively slow notebook hard drive and integrated 2D graphics. However, a new model, the LPC-401P, adds a faster CPU (a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4), a PC Card slot, a 120GB hard drive, and an 8X/8X/24X CD-RW drive. Those upgrades bumped the price up nearly a grand to $2080, but the aluminum chassis's dimensions remain unchanged.
If you're willing to go a little larger--about the size of two shoe boxes--companies like ABS and Amax sell systems with more powerful motherboards and higher-end components (such as a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU; a 200GB, 3.5-inch hard drive; and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro-based graphics). Amax also sells partially assembled units that include the heat sink, the motherboard, and the power supply--you add the hard drive, the optical drive, and the operating system. Like the Stealth PCs, these machines offer little internal expandability, but they're powerful enough for most apps and look very cool sitting on a desktop.
Melissa J. Perenson
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