Top 15 Desktop PCs
The Compaq GX5000Z lives up to its gaming billing, with high frame rates and a huge LCD.
Though the new Microflex 36A from Micro Express was a hair faster in our WorldBench 5 tests than the top-ranked Dell Dimension 8400, and $500 cheaper, the Dimension earned higher scores for graphics performance, sound quality, and LCD image quality--enough of a difference to make the Dell our Best Buy for the third month in a row. The MicroFlex comes in at number four on the power side of the chart.
Compaq's Athlon 64-based GX5000Z gaming system is a far cry from HP's usual gray boxes. This polished-aluminum tower is stylish without being garish like many gaming systems. It's also fast and nicely configured, with a high-end, 23-inch wide-screen display that makes up over a third of the system's total $5429 price. But if you can afford it, the LCD is definitely worth considering. Combined with the Compaq's quick NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card--which helped deliver some of the highest frame rates we've seen from a PC in our video game tests--the monitor takes gaming to a new level. Two knocks: The price does not include external speakers (though the built-in speakers on the LCD sounded surprisingly good), and we'd like to see more than the 148GB of space on the PC's two RAID hard drives.
The one new model earning a spot on the value portion of the chart is tailored for business use. Surprisingly, it comes from Alienware--a company known for its gaming PCs and big, extraterrestrial-themed cases. A slender black minitower with a professional look, Alienware's Bot has a conveniently small size that should fit any desk, but this compactness also limits its expandability (the configuration we tested had no open bays).