If you have the money, how could you not adore a custom Mach V system from Falcon Northwest? The metal cases are painted with the same quality as sports cars, and you can customize them with any logos, images, or colors you desire. If gaming, content creation, or video editing is your passion, then $4,000 to $5,000 might not seem too much to pay.

We tested the Mach V AMD Athlon XP 2800+ ($4,140 direct) and the Mach V Intel Pentium 4 3.0HT ($5,240). The Intel box Falcon submitted features a realistic American flag paint job that counts for $695 of the cost, and the AMD system had a black, almost mirror-like finish that added $545. Note that all this will cost you even more, as no monitors or speakers are included in the price quotes.

These are not just visual beauties. Falcon Northwest has proven to be a master of the enthusiast PC. Between the two Mach V systems, Falcon managed to snatch the top spot on all our performance tests. Interestingly, it's an even split: The Athlon-based machine took first on four tests, as did the P4 model.

We're big fans of using RAID Level 0 configurations in PCs. Falcon pairs 180GB, 7,200-rpm units in each of these Mach V systems. In addition to getting 360GB total from the RAID striping, you get blazing disk access times and performance boosts in just about everything that requires disk-intensive activity. Consider RAID 0 to be the Hyper-Threading of the hard disk world. Note that the speed, not the capacity, of the drives matters here. You could save hundreds by pairing smaller-capacity 7,200-rpm drives—say, two 80GB units—and still get the performance gain.

Both systems rely on the killer 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 Pro for graphics and the Creative Labs Audigy for sound (we would have preferred the Audigy 2). The components we're least impressed with are Falcon's choice of a 16X DVD-ROM drive and a 48X CD-RW drive. The burning speed of the latter is great, but at this price you should expect to get a DVD burner.

Falcon provides a three-year warranty on all Mach V systems, with the first year including roundtrip, overnight shipping. If speed is what you crave, these Mach V beauties deliver.