He loaded it with an Intel Core 2 Extreme running with a 1066MHz frontside bus. To that he added Windows Media Center, along with a tuner and remote. He upgraded the chassis to add video cooling, system lighting, and "high-performance liquid cooling". He dropped in 4 gigabytes of 800Mhz RAM, added three 750GB serial ATA drives, putting him well above 2 terabytes(!) in storage.

Not willing to miss out on any features, he dropped in dual DVD combo drives and dual 768MB NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX SLI video cards. The power demands on that were so huge, he needed to add in an 1,000 watt power supply and -- well, at this point, he ran out of slots. That's good, because so far, the box he's equipped tops $8,000. It's over our $5,000 limit for this article, but what price can you place on love?

It'll play World of Warcraft (and just about everything else) real smooth.

MonolithMC HD
While we're on the topic of PCs, we've got a home entertainment PC that'll blow you away. The MonolithMC HD is a surprisingly inexpensive home media PC, costing only $999 for a machine that can record and store your videos. Think of it as an open-source Tivo, because this beast runs Ubuntu Linux and MythTV, the open source DVR software. The HD version of the MonolithMC product has HD video out, all the way up to 1080p.

So, why are we recommending a Linux MythTV box, when you can go out and buy a Tivo? First, there's no monthly service fee. Second, it's nice to support a product that pre-ships with an installed Linux environment. And third, this has a lot of horsepower for managing videos, pictures, music and all the rest.

The inevitable Apple wishlist item
When you're on the subject of holiday gift wishes, someone out there's going to want a Mac. If you're thin enough and hip enough, perhaps you can be one of the lucky few who gets a sweet little overpriced MacBook Pro, shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

It's stylish and svelt. Are you? Click picture for a larger image.

The MacBook Pro is now running the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which is pretty darn quick. It's also got an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card, with 256MB SDRAM. Is it as fast as the Alienware's mobile graphics card? No way. But it's not bad for a Mac.

The system we equipped has 3GB (for some wacky reason, Apple tops off their MacBook Pros at 3GB -- go figure). Now, get this. When we added an extra 1GB of 667 DDR2 SDRAM to the mix, the system's price increased by $575 to $3,374.

Before you go off and buy that Mac, think about this. That's $575 whopping dollars for 1GB of RAM. So, how much extra is Apple gouging you for? The identical RAM, purchased from Crucial, is $146. Gotta love those Apple folks, eh?

Q1 -- a really teeny full PC
DominoPower contributor Ron Herardian suggested the Q1, shown in Figure D.