SPCR

Call it a bikini minitower: Sony Electronics' new Vaio desktop PC chassis has a gap or air intake in the middle instead of the front. Combined with a liquid-cooled heat exchanger and smaller, efficient fans, Sony says, the black case's airflow design drastically reduces ambient noise to increase enjoyment of AV applications -- like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, newly integrated with Sony's own Giga Pocket TV tuner and MPEG-2 encoder, Click To DVD authoring software, and a DVD±RW drive with DVD+R Double Layer capability.

Shipping in June, the Vaio VCG-RA710G (about $1,600) offers a Pentium 4/3.2E Hyper-Threading CPU, 512MB of DDR400 memory, a 250GB hard disk, and 128MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 AGP graphics. The flagship VCG-RA810G (about $2,400) will come with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of DDR400, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 128MB PCI Express ATI Radeon X600 Pro card. Custom configuration options will include up to 1.6 terabytes of Serial ATA storage (SharkyExtreme).