9. The Intel Fork: Motherboard And CPUs

Because we chose two mobile Core 2 Duo processors for our testing, we got a small, quiet stock cooler with the motherboard. Those who've seen a Pentium M will immediately recognize the T7200 and T7600 as their more powerful, dual-core cousins, with low power draw and miniature coolers to match. We chose an Asus N4L-VM to play host to our Intel processors.

The N4L-VM conforms to Intel VIIV specifications, which means it works especially well with Windows MCE, and is built around the Intel 945GM and ICH7M-DH chipsets. Retail pricing for this motherboard runs from $100 to $110. Its only noticeable drawback compared to the AMD mobos mentioned in the preceding section is built-in support for HDMI (but you can get that from the graphics card and this unit's internal S/PDIF header or use its external S/PDIF output to pipe audio through the graphics card's HDMI output).

As we were writing this story, Intel announced dramatic price cuts of up to 40% on many of its Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors. Thus, it's possible that by the time you read this processor prices we cite here may be too high. With that caveat in mind, we found T7200 retail box versions at $290 and up, and T7600 retail box versions at $682 and up. Including the Asus N4L-VM motherboard, this leads to total system prices of $2,527 for the T7200 version, and $3,009 for the T7600 version. Here again you could trim back by choosing a less powerful processor, cheaper memory and a smaller hard disk, but it would still be difficult to bring the price below $2,300.