Gateway 820GM

With practically soundless operation, the Gateway 820GM seems just the kind of PC/entertainment hybrid you'd want in your wall unit. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn't fit. Only lovers of muscle PCs are likely to be attracted by the look of this system's clunky tower case, which holds the big, slow-moving fans that make it so quiet. Nevertheless, for the office or family room, the 820GM is an excellent choice.

Our well-equipped $1650 test unit came with a multiformat DVD burner stacked atop a CD-ROM drive and an eight-in-one memory card reader. The 820GM tops all the other PCs here with seven USB ports, offering one on the front along with two FireWire ports and headphone and microphone jacks. On our tests the 820GM, with a 3-GHz Pentium 4 530 processor and 1GB of RAM, earned a WorldBench 5 score of 90; that was the median score for this group and just 6 percent slower than the fastest machine's mark.

Our 820GM came with a handsome black-and-silver 17-inch FPD 1750 LCD monitor and a multimedia keyboard with useful word processing and Internet navigation buttons. We liked the straightforward layout of the Gateway-branded Media Center remote control, which places all the major functions in the two top rows. The unit's speakers performed well. Like most of the other PCs here, however, the 820GM has a slow radio tuner; it also lacks a DVI connection for a digital LCD.

Upshot: Our second Best Buy, the Gateway 820GM has an attractive 17-inch LCD and 5.1 speakers. It is easily the quietest entertainment PC we tested for the January 2005 roundup.

Carla Thornton