Sweeter Spot alternatives
Perhaps you want a different graphics setup, or maybe you'd just like more storage capacity. Either way, our alternatives should cover your needs.

Graphics
Not everybody needs to game at 2560x1600. Not everybody might be able to find a Radeon HD 5850 in stock, either. For those reasons, we're recommending Gigabyte's "factory-overclocked" GeForce GTX 260 as an alternative here. This product lacks DirectX 11 support and actually consumes more power than the Radeon, but it's still quick enough to run just about any game at 1920x1200 with 4X AA and smooth frame rates—and it's actually available right now.

Storage
In our view, three hard drives stand out the most in this price range: the 640GB Caviar Black, the 1TB Caviar Black, and the 1TB Caviar Green. The first of the three already has a choice spot in our primary config, but picking among the latter two is a trickier affair. The 1TB Caviar Black has great performance, but it's noticeably louder than either alternative. The eco-friendly, Prius-driving Caviar Green is the opposite, with only decent performance but very low noise levels.

After much debating, we've decided to leave out the 1TB Caviar Black and recommend the following: use either one or two 640GB Caviar Blacks to store your operating system and applications, then grab one or two 1TB Caviar Greens if you require additional storage capacity. Getting two identical drives opens the door to RAID 1, which can improve read performance and allow a system to survive a single drive failure without data loss. Having a constant, real-time mirror of your system drive can save loads of time—so much so that at least two of TR's editors run RAID 1 in their primary desktops.

If you value storage capacity over redundancy, though, nothing stops you from running drives independently, combining them in massive JBOD arrays, or setting up riskier but potentially faster RAID 0 configurations.

TV tuner
The AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe tuner of system guides past has faded out of online listings. In its absence, we've chosen Hauppauge's WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE kit to fill in. Just like the AVerTV, 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, a hardware MPEG encoder, Windows Vista certification, and a Windows Media Center-certified remote control. Newegg customers sound fairly happy with it, as well.