The 8 Best Desktop Computers

Editor's Notes

October 27, 2026, by Ezvid Wiki Admin:

The Dell Tower Plus now leads this list. It's a quiet, upgradable tower with plenty of memory, and it suits the home and office work most readers asked about. Every old pick was hardware from 2013 to 2021, so the Asus ROG Strix GA15DK, Acer Aspire TC, M1 Mac Mini, Acer Aspire Z24, Minix Neo J50-C, Computer Upgrade King Sentinel, Dell Inspiron 3471 and Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P are gone.

The Apple Mac mini returns with its M6 chip as the value pick, and the Asus NUC 15 Pro+ covers small Windows offices. The rest are gaming machines, from the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme up to the Skytech King 95.

We built the list from bench reviews at Wired, Tom's Hardware, PC Gamer, PCMag and Notebookcheck, then checked each configuration's memory, graphics card and power supply against Apple, Dell and Asus spec pages. No all-in-one made the cut this time: Apple's M6 iMac ships in early November, and the Windows models we looked at were slow or overpriced.

July 29, 2021:

We're still relatively happy with our previous selection, and a good handful of those same models have been updated and re-released since our last Wiki update. The Asus ROG Strix GA15DK is our sole brand new addition thanks to its powerful components and mid-range price. Otherwise, we continue to recommend the refreshed Acer Aspire TC Series and Apple Mac Mini, the latter of which is especially notable because of the powerful M1 processor developed in-house by Apple.

July 12, 2020:

You can spend just about as little or as much as you want on a desktop PC. On the inexpensive side, it's tough to beat the Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P; yes, its CPU is several generations old at this point, but its 4th-gen quad-core Intel i5 is still definitely powerful enough to satisfy those who aren't power users. In fact, with a 256-gigabyte solid-state drive, it's considerably faster than a majority of computers of the same age and form factor.

The Asus Chromebox 3 is another reasonably priced model that comes in a few performance tiers, and even the less powerful versions are quite capable of providing a fast and user-friendly experience on Chrome OS. The Apple Mac Mini offers another alternate operating system, and though it's quite a bit more costly than the chromebox, it's arguably more powerful and more streamlined. The Minx Neo N42C-4 is built in a similar form factor to those two but uses the much more common Windows 10 OS.

The HP Pavilion TP01, Dell Inspiron 3471, and Acer Aspire TC Series all have something that many tower PCs today don't, which is a DVD burner. The Acer Aspire Z24 also has one, and it has quite a bit more, as well: as an all-in-one PC, all its components are hidden behind a high-quality Acer monitor, allowing it to take up considerably less desk space than a traditional tower-and-monitor setup.

If you're in the market for something capable of playing the latest AAA titles, consider the Skytech Archangel or even more powerful Computer Upgrade King Sentinel Black. Either of these packs enough firepower to run games at high resolutions and frame rates for many years to come.

February 06, 2019:

There are a lot of things that desktop PCs can do that make them quite worth the investment, even though they're quite stationary. Because they're larger and disperse heat better, there's simply more room for high-end components, as well as power-hungry chipsets, that might otherwise get friend in a clamshell-style body. And, of course, there's currently no shortage of high-end components to cram into these might behemoths.

One group that's particularly keen on a good desktop is gamers, most of whom are pretty excited about the current state of gaming hardware (even though their excitement about big-name game developers, on the other hand, may be a little more muted). For those who want to play the latest, most graphics-intensive titles, but don't want to go through the hassle of assembling their own machine, should check out the iBuyPower, which, despite its somewhat silly name, is a complete powerhouse. At well under two grand, it's also pretty reasonably priced, considering nearly half of that cost would go towards the RTX 2070 GPU, all on its own. If money is no object, the Skytech Supreme is almost as nice as they come, and not only is it fast — it is, in a word, gorgeous. The CUK Continuum doesn't look quite as bold and flashy, but its GPU and CPU are, at the moment, the literal fastest on the consumer market. But, again, it's pretty costly.

For a do-it-all desktop, look to any of the releases from Hewlett Packard. From their high-end touch screen all-in-one, to their stunning, 34-inch ultrawide, it's easy to see that they really know how to make a high-quality box. And while it may be somewhat of a shocker, Apple also offers a very solid entry in the category, with their most recent Mac Mini outpacing nearly everything, in terms of performance per cubic inch. If you want to forego the hassle of Microsoft's recent Windows Update debacles (something that's more pertinent than ever), this minuscule device offers plenty of oomph to get a lot of things done.

But if you REALLY have a lot of work to do, and that work demands massive processing power, the Surface Studio 2 happens to be one of the best-put-together devices on the planet, and it's perfectly suited to high-end design and engineering professionals. Finally, if you just need a good PC that won't leave you waiting around for tasks to finish, the Acer is one of the best deals you'll find, and you really won't have to sacrifice much computing power.