We see two viable home theater PC scenarios right now. One puts a small, attractive PC in your living room that connects directly to your television. It might receive media files over a wireless network from a second PC that acts as a media server, or you might keep all of your media on it directly. In the other scenario, your full-size desktop sits on your desk, away from the TV, but it sends your music and videos to your television directly over your home network. You'll need a media extender, an Xbox 360, or possibly Apple's forthcoming iTV to push media files over your home network, although we're starting to see some high-end TVs with network adapters.

Both scenarios have their shortcomings. Adding a small PC to your living room means a more cluttered home theater rack. The remote, full-size PC works only with music and photos right now because video still has too many rights management and format issues, not to mention that many wireless networks don't have wide enough bandwidth to send those large video files smoothly. A few, extremely high-end home theater PCs can replace your audio receiver and your DVD player, but unless your recent team up with Timbaland went gold or Google just bought your revolutionary new online copyright-violation service, this seamless, digital media-drenched future lies out of reach for most of us.

Thus, we approached the home theater PC portion of this shopping exercise with two ideas in mind. The first is that we're not spending more than $1,500 for our PC (not including monitor and speakers). The second is that the perfect setup doesn't exist in this price range. Therefore, we're ready to compromise. The idea is that we'll compromise wisely.

Shopping at retail
Our first stop was Best Buy. We went to two stores in Manhattan; one had 14 desktops on display, and the other, larger store had 25. Best Buy's Web site lists 35 PCs total, so we'll refer to that figure to eliminate regional or store inventory differences.

Of the 35 PCs and Macs listed online, 8 exceeded our price limit. And removing the three that didn't use the Media Center OS, we were left with 24. We're going to take a bold stance here and demand that our home theater come with wireless networking built in. This is probably more important for our first, small-PC scenario, but we're of the mind that wireless networking is one of the keys to home theater PC acceptance--the fewer wires cluttering things up the better. Yes, you can add wireless after the fact, but we're being price conscious, and we don't want to have to worry about it later on. That left us with just 8 computers: 3 HPs and 5 Apples.

From the remaining PCs, we scratched off the two stock-configuration Mac Minis and two HP Slimlines, because we know we can customize those systems with more memory and larger hard drives on Apple's and HP's Web sites and still remain within our price range. That left three Apple iMacs and the HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7674n, all of which would work in our "computer streaming media from another room" scenario. Even though the iMacs boast good looks and competitive prices, HP's m7674n configuration gets the nod because it serves up the most memory and hard drive space, not to mention a handy media card reader It has a TV tuner too, which is fine, but we also like its price. Since it costs $1,259, you can even add a 20-inch LCD and still come in less than the most expensive iMac at Best Buy. It's also more upgradable. And there's a bonus: Best Buy is offering free shipping on that model, so even if you order online you win.

Circuit City's Union Square Manhattan store had a similar selection to Best Buy's. We saw 13 models in the store. The Circuit City Web site features 34 PCs. Applying the same filters as above to ensure our choices meet our price range, feature a media-friendly OS, and come with wireless networking, we had many of the same choices we found at Best Buy. The iMacs and the Mac Minis continued to stand out, as did a few of the higher-end HP Pavilion desktops. We stopped to look at a few all-in-one and component-style Sony VAIOs, but tempting as they were, they're priced above our self-imposed $1,500 cap. HP's new Digital Entertainment Center z560 also caught our eye, but it, too, was more than we wanted to spend.

Staying within our price range at Circuit City, the HP Pavilion Media Center TV PC m7680n emerged as our favorite. It costs $1,249 (before $70 in rebates) and gives you a Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU, 2GB of memory, a pair of 250GB hard drives, as well as a DVD burner, and a spare DVD-ROM drive. Like the Best Buy model, it also uses Nvidia's GeForce 7300 LE graphics card--not a great choice since it's what's called a TurboCache card. That's a deceptive way of saying that, like an integrated video chip, it will steal from the system memory when necessary, to the detriment of overall performance. You can get a non-TurboCache model on your own for about $60 to $70.

Model	HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7680n
Price	$1,249
CPU	2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Chipset	Intel 965X
Memory	2GB of PC2-4200 DDR2 SDRAM (533MHz)
Hard drive	(2) 250GB Serial ATA hard drive (7,200rpm)
Graphics	256MB Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE (TurboCache)
Audio	Integrated 7.1 channel audio
Optical drive	16X double-layer DVD burner, 16X DVD-ROM
Media card reader	Yes
Networking	10/100 Ethernet, 802.11g wireless adapter
OS	Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Software	Microsoft Works 8, Money 2006; HP Photosmart Premier; Sonic DigitalMedia Plus, MyDVD; Adobe Acrobat Reader 7; Quicken New User Edition 2006; RealPlayer; DVD Play; Muvee AutoProducer and more
Monitor/speakers	None
Warranty	One year

Circuit City's system has to be our winner. It has more hard drive space than the Best Buy unit, and its pair of optical drives is a nice touch. Throw in the rebate, and the m7680n comes in as an even better deal than the one in Best Buy: $1,179 vs. the $1,259 m7674n. So for media PCs, retail goes to Circuit City. Again, we're looking at a PC that works best with our second home theater PC setup, effectively becoming a streaming media server, rather than sitting directly next to your television. What's nice about the price of this one is that you can buy a nice LCD monitor or even most of an Xbox 360, which would double as a Windows Media Center Extender. That would bridge the gap nicely between the PC and your TV.

Shopping online
Not surprisingly, we found a wider variety of systems and in multiple form factors online. You also get the benefit of configuring a PC yourself when you shop on a PC vendor's Web site. We hit 10 sites; we'll try to keep it brief.

Alienware: We didn't find a good match on Alienware's site; neither its Area-51 nor its Aurora desktops offer the value of the HP Pavilion m7680n. The component-style DHS 2 has specs that are a generation out of date, so we don't recommend that either. Alienware has announced a new Media Center design, the DHS Series A. It's scheduled to debut in January for $1,000, complete with an HDMI out and a built-in 1,000-watt amp. We've got our eye on it, but we're more interested in what we can buy today.

Apple: Apple's desktops were well represented at retail but only in the core configurations, which fell short on either price, hard drive size, or memory. Online, the situation didn't look much better. If you customize the Mac Mini to compare to the HP m7680n, you can get close, but with a slower CPU and a smaller hard drive. The iMac is more robust but also more expensive. Even the 17-inch model ran up to $1,649 when we equalized the RAM and the storage space. And yes, the iMac comes with a display and the HP doesn't, but remember, our HP of choice is only $1,179 (after rebate). We've seen 22-inch wide-screen LCDs on sale for $330, so even if you add a monitor to the HP, it's still cheaper than an equivalent iMac, and it's more fully loaded. We won't argue that Apple has the design edge, but since either the HP or the iMac would ideally go in another room, looks aren't as important to us as raw capability.

Cyberpower: It's definitely not a household name, but Cyberpower sells a PC that intrigued us. When we priced out a Cyberpower Media Center PC Ultra 9000 with specs similar to the HP Pavilion m7674n at Circuit City, we ended up with a price of $1,465. That includes a sharp-looking silver component case (which you'd have to add using Cyberpower's configurator), an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor, an Nforce 4 SLI motherboard, 2GB of memory, a Vista-perfect 256MB GeForce 7600 GS video card, and two 250GB hard drives. Plus, it includes the same DVD-burner/DVD-ROM optical drive combo as the HP and a wireless mouse and keyboard, and there's a wireless network adapter built in. It's a bit more expensive than our Circuit City Pavilion, but it has a great living-room form factor, and its 3D graphics are more robust than the HP's.

Model	Cyberpower Media Center PC Ultra 9000
Price	$1,249
CPU	2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200
Chipset	Nvidia Nforce 4 SLI
Memory	2GB of PC2-4200 DDR SDRAM (400MHz)
Hard drive	(2) 250GB Serial ATA hard drive (7,200rpm)
Graphics	256MB Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS
Audio	Integrated 7.1 channel audio
Optical drive	16X double-layer DVD burner, 16X DVD-ROM
Media card reader	Yes
Networking	10/100 Ethernet, 802.11g wireless adapter
OS	Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Monitor/speakers	None
Warranty	One year

Dell: Dell is HP's main competition. Right off the bat, HP wins on price. When we matched specs, the Dell XPS 210 came in at $1,586, the XPS 410 was $1,301, and the Dimension E520 was closest at $1,284. We should add that all of those prices include an optional external wireless router, since surprisingly, Dell doesn't offer an internal Wi-Fi card on any of its desktops. The external router is a good option if you don't currently have a wireless network at home and would like one, but if you're already Wi-Fi enabled, Dell doesn't make it easy to wirelessly add one of its PCs to your network.

Gateway: Similar to Dell, Gateway has a hard time competing with our winning HP on price. The midrange Gateway DX420X came in at $1,409 for a system with similar specs. Then we went one step up to the higher-end FX500 series and specced out an identical FX510S as well. That came to $1,559. Gateway does offer internal Wi-Fi cards, but its prices simply can't compete with HP's.

Shuttle: It's not unreasonable to say that when you think of small PCs, you think of Shuttle, since it invented the concept. It has so many systems to choose from, in fact, that we couldn't cover them all. So we picked out the XPC X100, the more affordable of the two options under the Media Center header on Shuttle's Web site. It was priced to match: $1,753. We were impressed to see a Core 2 Duo chip available at all, so we'll give Shuttle credit for staying up to date. We also like the compact design, since it stacks up very well against the Mac Mini. But cramming all of your components into such a small box comes with a price premium.

Sony: Like we saw in the stores, Sony currently offers no desktop PCs under our $1,500 limit. Its current desktop line is also pretty out of date in general, at least for processors. True, the VAIO RC310G is one of only a handful of PCs out right now with a Blu-ray drive in it, but it uses a Pentium D 945 CPU. Old school, man.

Velocity Micro: Velocity Micro is known for its gaming PCs and for great deals around the $1,000 mark, but its Media Center PC selection could use a little work. We priced out a ProMagix DCX for $1,864 and a Vector PCX for $1,383, but the latter doesn't have Windows Media Center available as an OS option. We were intrigued by Velocity Micro's CineMagix M50 Home Entertainment Computer System, which looks like a DVD player, but its value proposition is out of whack. Even if we forget about the cheaper HP and compare this system to the $1,448 Cyberpower we like, the M50's CPU, hard drive, and memory are all below spec.

Our media center pick
Keeping in mind that this story involves no hands-on testing, we've whittled our on-paper picks to two PCs you might want to integrate into your home theater. Circuit City's offer for a $1,249 HP Pavilion Media Center PC TV m7680n will look even more attractive if you mail-in that $170 rebate check. And Cinderella-story Cyberpower has a stronger-but-pricier offering in its $1,448 Media Center PC Ultra 9000.

The midtower HP is designed to shoot media to your TV from your desk and over your home network. The Cyberpower will actually sit under your television, and--thanks to its Wi-Fi adapter--it can also act as a receiver for other wireless devices in your home. We think this makes it more adaptable than a desktop. We also like that it has a powerful 3D graphics card, making it ready for Windows Vista, video decoding, and even playing some games. You certainly won't go wrong with the Pavilion Media Center PC TV m7680n, but the Cyberpower puts the extra $200 in its price tag to good use. It gives you more bang for the buck in a more versatile form factor. After shopping in stores and online, the Cyberpower Media Center PC Ultra 9000 gets the nod.