Dell XPS 8700 Special Edition Series

The Dell XPS 8700 Special Edition desktop PC will do the trick whether you're looking to edit video, cleanup photos, or enjoy some games, making it a great all-around...

HP’s Envy, on the other hand, costs $200 less and comes with a 256GB SSD (HP also offers more configuration options, although you can’t upgrade to a better video card). Neither machine is a gaming powerhouse, but both provide good price/performance ratios and reasonable headroom for down-the-road upgrades.

Dell packages this one with an Nvidia video card with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory, which isn't quite as much as my top pick, but the advantages of this one certainly even out. If you don't plan on playing a lot of PC games, then this is probably going to be a better choice for you, depending on what you need from your system.

So if you don’t want, say the dedicated sound card or so much RAM, you may want to look for a machine that’s more configurable. We’d certainly be happy to trade half of this system’s RAM and the dedicated sound card for a 256GB solid-state drive instead.

Aside from its mostly unnecessary abundance of RAM, the XPS 8700 Special Edition is a well-rounded performance desktop that's a good fit as a family PC or a dorm-room power tower. It's powerful enough to handle pretty much any task that you throw at...

Nevertheless, the XPS 8700, as configured, is a burly system without a beastly price tag. And since it's not using proprietary parts, you're free to perform upgrades on your own.