By David Gussman
(July 23, 2004)
(July 23, 2004)
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What makes our dream PC tick? For starters, its custom paint job is easy on the eyes. You can find a variety of PC cases these days, but nothing can top the layered, custom-designed automotive finish courtesy of Smooth Creations. Inside, our lean, mean computing machine sports parts that would appeal to gamers or power users who hunger for the best in PC performance. For example, digital video editors and filmmakers would salivate at our dream PC's 650GB of storage space, and overclockers would drool over the hidden potential provided by the 550-watt power supply.
We chose not to perform any overclocking; our dream PC's components are running at their factory-default settings. In fact, you can buy many of the parts we selected from PC vendors--from big, bad Dell to smaller shops such as Falcon Northwest. Other supplies you'll see here--the power supply and the heat sink, for instance--are harder to order in a retail desktop system. For those parts, we turned to FrozenCPU, an online purveyor of PC supplies. With a seemingly infinite number of choices, we couldn't choose just one way to go, which is why you'll see alternatives listed to some of the parts we selected. With that, we give you our dream PC--no purse strings attached.
| Case concerns | ||
We choose a case and a power supply that will be able to house and power our dream PC's components. | ||
| Intel or AMD? | ||
Find out which processor we picked, along with our choice for motherboard and memory. | ||
| A quartet of hard drives | ||
Our dream PC's hard drives deliver speed and massive storage capacity. | ||
| Trump cards | ||
We draw a pair of aces with our graphics and sound card selections. | ||
| Peripheral picks | ||
We carefully select a monitor, some speakers, a keyboard, and a mouse befitting our dream PC. | ||
| Time to test | ||
We put our dream PC through its paces. | ||
| Check, please | ||
Discover how much each component costs and give us your feedback. |
CNET Labs technician David Gussman resides in Queens, New York--not far from the home of his beloved, beleaguered New York Mets.
Senior Editor Matt Elliott edited this story. When not dreaming of desktops, he edits and writes desktop reviews for CNET Reviews.
Senior Editor Matt Elliott edited this story. When not dreaming of desktops, he edits and writes desktop reviews for CNET Reviews.

