Alienware DHS-5

From the company best known for branding its PCs with images of little green men comes the Alienware DHS 5, the most conservative-looking unit in our roundup. An imposing black box 17 inches wide, 5.25 inches tall, and 18 inches long, the DHS 5 is slightly larger than a VCR; but it's a handsome PC that would look good in any room of the house. The front features a blue-ringed power button and a slot-fed multiformat DVD burner that also supports DVD-RAM. An LCD displays the time and date or the current music CD track. Front connections--including an eight-in-one memory card reader, two of the PC's six USB ports, and a FireWire port--lie behind one spring-loaded door that blends seamlessly with the case. The rear provides the standard PC and entertainment connections, including coaxial TV, FM, DVI, and S/PDIF ports. One drawback is slow radio tuning, which plagued many of the units we saw.

The wireless remote receivers on most competing systems are separate USB units that dangle off the PC; but the DHS 5's sensor is built in, with two rear infrared blaster ports. The wireless Gyration keyboard we received, however, was too small for comfortable typing. Equipped with a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 3500+ processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive, the DHS 5 performed well in our speed tests, earning a WorldBench 5 score of 92--just 4 percent slower than the 96 claimed by this roundup's top performer, the HP Media Center PC M1050y, with its 3.8-GHz Pentium 4 570 CPU. The DHS 5 comes with a good user manual, a rarity among this group of entertainment PCs. Finally, Alienware went all out by including an outstanding 30-inch BenQ DV3070 LCD monitor with the DHS 5; the display adds $3450 to the package's $5578 price.