1.5TB from Dell

According to Tom's Hardware Guide, Dell has improved its Dimension XPS Gen 5. Now, the company's engineers offer users the possibility to connect 500GB SATAII hard drives, Dell being the first system producer that makes this move.

So, everyone craving for humongous storage spaces can fit their computers with three of these drives, amounting to an incredible 1.5TB.

The standard version of this model comes with one Pentium 4 640 (3.2 GHz) processor and has a price a little under $2000. However, the buyer might go for a dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition processor, 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory and one of the following video solutions: GeForce 6800 with 256MB and ATI X850 XT PE with the same amount of memory.

With these components, XPS Gen 5 will easily reach the $5,000 threshold, and if you add some other goodies, the price will levitate somewhere around $6,500 (I used the word 'levitate' because few of us can afford such a system).

If you still want a powerful computer, without having to sell a kidney to buy one, you can choose DimensionTM 9100, with a price tag starting from $1050. For this amount of money, you get: one Pentium 4 630 (3 GHz) processor, 512 MB of memory, one 160GB HDD, one DVD/CD-RW device, one ATI X300 SE video card with 128MB and Windows Media Center Edition 2005.