Sweeter Spot alternatives
Perhaps you want an AMD graphics card, or maybe you'd rather trick out the Sweeter Spot a little more. Either way, our Sweeter Spot alternatives should cover your needs.

Graphics
As we see it, grabbing a second GeForce GTX 260 and teaming the two in SLI mode is the simplest way to run every current game comfortably above 1920x1200. That extra GTX 260 may even increase frame rates by almost 100%, like in Far Cry 2 at 2560x1600. However, dual GTX 260s will draw a fair amount of power and take up a good chunk of space inside your case.

If you don't feel like dealing with the hassles of SLI, you can still get a handful of extra FPS by opting for a single EVGA GeForce GTX 275 or XFX Radeon HD 4890. You'll be paying a $70-80 premium for a relatively marginal performance increase, but we acknowledge that some gamers do care about that extra bit of smoothness.

The GTX 275 and 4890 OC ran pretty much neck and neck in our tests, so we can probably assume this vanilla 4890 is a tad slower. It's also $10 cheaper than the GeForce, however, and it comes with a $20 mail-in rebate on top of that—not a bad deal. Both of these alternatives also have lifetime warranty coverage if you register on the vendor's website within 30 days.

Storage
What's better than two 640GB Caviar Blacks running in RAID 1? Two 1TB Caviar Blacks, of course. These drives have meaty capacities, excellent performance, and five-year warranties, although they're relatively loud when seeking. Few products even come close in the realm of high-capacity system drives, however.

TV tuner
The AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe we picked for our last home-theater PC build has returned here, since we figure you might want to watch or record TV on your PC. This tuner has a PCI Express x1 interface, inputs for both analog and digital TV, support for ATSC and Clear QAM high-definition digital TV standards, and a hardware MPEG encoder with 3D comb and ghost-reduction filters. On top of that, the AVerTV is certified for Windows Vista x86 and x64, and it comes with a Vista Media Center-ready remote control. Newegg customers sound quite happy with it, as well.

We suggest running either Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate if you get this tuner, since both OSes come with Microsoft's Windows Media Center software. You might also want to grab the Windows Media Center TV Pack, which adds support for tuning unencrypted digital cable, among other improvements.