What a great deal! Although slightly more than the magical $1,000 price threshold, the Gateway 300X feels much like a ready-to-use and ready-to-keep PC—because it is. The Micro Tower has expansion slots and a lot of nifty items that fill up the maxed-out bays.

The first thing to note on the 300X is the 15-inch flat-panel display. Though it isn't the crispest LCD on the market, the screen is a lot easier to look at than the Dimension's included 15-inch CRT. And we like the 300X's Boston Acoustics BA745 speakers.

Inside the 300X you'll find a 40GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive and 256MB of DDR RAM. The most exciting internals, however, are the two optical drives. Getting a DVD-ROM and a 24X CD-RW drive at this price is well worth mentioning. The only type of expansion most users will do with this machine is adding external devices, which the 300X generously accommodates with four USB 2.0 ports on the back of the case and two on the front.

As mentioned earlier, the performance of the two machines was close. But in testing, the Gateway system came out slightly ahead more often than not. The 300X also has a one-year parts-and-labor warranty and comes with a year of AOL (for new members) or six months of MSN (for new members). For a limited time, you also get a copy of The Sims, proving quite adequately that some games run just fine on a new Celeron.

For all you get, the Gateway 300X is the better deal, which is why it's our Editors' Choice. Still, at the core, the two machines are very much of the same breed.