Top 15 Desktop PCs
The latest Athlon processor from AMD is making a big impact on our chart: Two new systems that use the Athlon 64 FX-53 join the power section of our chart, and a third debuts on the value side.
Photograph by Rick Rizner
The ABS Ultimate M6 takes the top spot in our ranking of power systems. This beefy unit comes tricked out with pretty much everything you could hope for. In addition to its Athlon 64 FX-53 processor, it has a massive 2GB of DDR400 memory and enough hard disk space to keep even the most avid video editor going for a few weeks. There are three hard drives in this system: a Maxtor 250GB Serial-ATA drive, and two 74GB] Western Digital Raptor SATA drives connected to a RAID controller (so they appear to user as one very fast drive: see the Tech Trend for more details). This arrangement would be ideal for someone who works with digital media. The Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1 speaker set that the system came with earned the Best Buy in our February Spotlight on speakers and sound cards (see "Audio Nirvana: Cards to Speakers").
Alienware's newest Aurora Extreme has many of the same components as the ABS, such as the Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU, a trio of hard drives (two yoked to a RAID controller), and 1GB of DDR400 memory. Although we also received a 22-inch NEC MultiSync FE221SB CRT monitor with our review unit, we were unimpressed with its image quality--text was readable but not particularly sharp, and images had good (but not outstanding) colors.
All of this power comes at a price, however: Both of these PCs are extremely expensive. At $4619 for the Alienware and an even steeper $4972 for the ABS, they should be great systems.
Budget Performance
Fortunately, the FX-53 processor isn't appearing solely in expensive power systems: The Cyberpower Gamer Ultra 7000 uses the speedy new CPU, but its price comes in at just under $1700. Not surprisingly, this PC isn't as well outfitted as the two more-expensive ones: It lacks a rewritable DVD drive, has a less impressive set of speakers, and packs a single 120GB hard drive. However, with a PC WorldBench 4 score of 146--the fastest on the value list--it nearly kept pace with the very high-priced ABS and Alienware, which achieved scores of 147 and 150, respectively. The images rendered by the combination of the Cyberpower's 19-inch ViewSonic E90B CRT monitor and the 256MB XFX GeForce FX 5700LE graphics card looked sharp, with realistic colors. The system did not perform as well in games, though; we didn't see the high frame rates we've observed in systems running higher-end graphics cards.
Also new on the value list is the Velocity Micro Vision 64, another model that came with a good selection of high-end components. Velocity Micro went with AMD's Athlon 64 3400+ processor and 512MB of DDR400 RAM. One thing that impressed us about this system was the way that every cable inside was secured to keep cooling airflow unobstructed; the company claims that it assembles all its machines this way. The system also came with Ulead's Digital Creation Suite--a good program for people just starting out in digital photo or video editing.
The Sony VAIO Digital Studio PCV-RS520, as the name suggests, also comes bundled with digital media software, in the form of Sony's PictureGear Studio photo management software, plus video editing and DVD authoring software. However, we found the speakers a bit disappointing for a system designed for use with digital media; the set lacked a subwoofer and produced tinny, weak sound.
Two PCs we tested this month didn't make the value section of the chart: the HP Compaq Dx2000 and the Pogo Linux Altura 64. The Dx2000 is a system designed for small and medium businesses: For a model with a 3-GHz Pentium 4 processor and a 15-inch LCD monitor, it is very moderately priced at $1140. However, the system's performance fell a little behind the curve, with a PC WorldBench 4 score of 122. Read our full review.
The Pogo Linux Altura 64 carried both Windows XP Professional and SuSE Linux Pro 9 preinstalled, along with a boot manager for choosing between them when you start up the system. It achieved a very solid PC WorldBench 4 score of 139. Read our full review of this system.
Serial ATA RAID: Hard Drives in the Fast Lane
Photograph by Marc Simon
Another reason we've seen more SATA RAID systems is that the required controllers are now integrated into many high-end motherboards, such as the Asus boards used in the Alienware Aurora Extreme and ABS Ultimate M6 systems we review this month.
The five RAID systems on our chart use RAID Level 0, where the hard drive controller stripes data across both linked drives, using the full capacity of both. This approach improves performance by allowing both of the drives to read and write simultaneously, greatly boosting the data-transfer rate. Because of transactional overhead, throughput does not double, but tests of IDE RAID controllers we conducted last year (reported in "Hardware Boost for Hard Drives") revealed speed improvements of between 8 and 44 percent--a sizable amount for tasks that involve a lot of disk activity, such as video editing.
Of course, striping doesn't secure your data or keep your system running in case of a drive failure: If one of the drives in your RAID 0 setup dies--and you don't have a backup--you've lost all your data. RAID Level 1 mirrors one hard drive's contents to the other in real time--allowing a system to keep running if one drive fails. RAID 1 provides no performance benefit and allows you to use the capacity of only one of the two drives. Most desktop RAID controllers will handle either striping or mirroring. If you lie awake at night worrying about a hard drive going down, you may be able to customize your new system with RAID Level 1. Generally, the systems that offer mirroring are workstations aimed at professional users or servers. ABS, for instance, offers RAID Level 1 as an option on its Navigator workstations. The systems we've reviewed are configured for maximum speed. According to Alienware product manager Kevin O'Neill, "Our machines are typically configured to appeal to those who crave performance." These days, that means efficient SATA drives and RAID Level 0--an idea whose time has come.