What to Look For in a New Desktop

Optical drive: Upgrade to Blu-ray later

As DVD burners have become increasingly faster, there are fewer differentiating factors among them. You're primarily deciding between CD/DVD burning and CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning. (You can purchase a Blu-ray drive that plays video disks and read-only Blu-ray disks, but that seems like half a loaf.)

The latest generation of Blu-ray drives can burn 25GB or 50GB to a single disk. But the upgrade is pricey: often $300 (HP) to $470 (Dell) to install a Blu-ray writer instead of a fast CD/DVD burner. Blank Blu-ray discs are ruinous: from $10 to $20 each for 25GB media and $35 to $50 each for 50GB media.

But with Blu-ray the winner in the high-definition video market, prices for both home players and PC drives will plummet this year, as will blank media, since users will buy such media in larger volumes. And most of us use hard drives for larger backups, anyway.

Our verdict: Wait for Blu-ray to become a $150 to $200 upgrade, and for 50GB media to drop to $20. Optical drives in desktops are often a simple upgrade.

Monitor: Big LCD displays = pricey video card

You can buy stunningly large LCD displays from several PC makers -- 30 inches at 2560 by 1600 pixels, say -- and video support for using a single one of these behemoths is typically an included cost for any business desktop. The PC will need a dual-link DVI connection for such a big display, because of the sheer number of pixels involved.

If you need to use two or more monitors, especially two 30-inch beauties, costs can mount for the video card upgrade. Typically, you can manage two monitors, at least one of them 30 inches in size, with the included card or a very cheap upgrade ($15 for one Lenovo model, for instance).

Driving two 30-inch LCDs, however, means that the dollars can start to add up. Apple builds the cost of two dual-link DVI connectors into all its Mac Pro models, which tend to start with options that bring their price higher than comparable PC makers' workstations.

Other manufacturers offer cards at an upgrade cost starting at $400 for such support, with prices that can reach into the thousands for the highest-performance cards.

Our verdict: If you consider two or more 30-inch LCDs vital to your work, you're simply choosing how much power under the hood -- from the video card -- you're going to buy.