Polywell MiniBox 939NX-MCE

Polywell's $1888 MiniBox 939NX-MCE comes in a squat, silver-and-black case that at 9 inches tall would look at home on a living-room shelf or an office desk. The case projects "geek chic" with a large window revealing the PC's inner workings, as well as a small blue LED on the front that displays the temperature of the CPU and hard drive. A folding handle makes the PC easily portable, and the included wireless Logitech keyboard is a nice touch.

The MiniBox doesn't scrimp on features. The front of the case offers a dual-layer DVD±RW drive, a DVD-ROM drive, a four-in-one media card reader, two USB ports, a microphone jack, and a headphone jack. Storage is important on any Media Center PC, and the MiniBox provides two 250GB hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array, which can supply faster performance. (The unit has no free bays for additional drives; if you want to swap the drives for bigger ones, however, the hard-drive chassis is very easy to access. Also, all the RAM slots and external drive bays are full, and if you want to add an expansion card to the open PCI slot or open x1 PCI Express slot, you'll have to remove the graphics and TV-tuner cards.) The MiniBox produced a very impressive WorldBench 5 score of 102--making it the fastest value system we've tested recently. The PC is outfitted with a dual-core 2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU, 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM, and an EVGA E-GeForce 6600 graphics card.