By Cheryl Currid

From orange juice to cream cheese, consumers have different expectations for the house brand versus the national brand.

House brands are usually packaged in style-challenged containers, may suffer from quality inconsistencies, and are bargain priced.

But, in its recent introduction of a house brand line of computers, Best Buy blows away conventional wisdom.

To start, you know there's something different by the design. The vpr Matrix series was designed by F.A. Porsche, the grandson of the legendary car designer Ferdinand Porsche. Using a design philosophy that form and function can be brought together, the look of the vpr Matrix offers an angular look instead of the current trend of rounded PC designs.

But the difference in this house brand doesn't stop at its shape. The computer uses high-end quality components and up-to-the-minute technology features usually found in top-dollar brands. From what I could see, there's no skimping or dumbing down to save a nickel or dime on production costs. The vpr Matrix brand goes head-to-head with top national brands.

I've just tried two vpr Matrix products with great success, one a notebook, the other a desktop.

The 200A5, with its easy-on-the-eyes 15.2-inch-wide screen and its great stereo headphones, is a notebook computer that makes no compromises. It is powered by a 2-gigahertz Pentium 4 Processor-M and comes with a generous 40-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of speedy double data rate memory, a combo drive that gives you DVD and CD-RW, and a great nVidia 32 MB GeForce4 420 graphics card.

The notebook also sports plenty of expansion ports for VGA or S-video, two USB 2.0 and two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports, a built-in WiFi 802.11b network capability and a 10/100 network port. Standard ports for audio, modem, parallel and serial are included as well.

It weighs in at 6.4 pounds with all accessories and battery on board. This notebook is configured for top-tier computing and carries a reasonable price of $2,399. And for some work environments, it challenges the need to have both a desktop and a notebook.

But, for those who do want separate desktop and notebook computers, the vpr Matrix line has you covered.

I tried the sleek FT6100 desktop tower with a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processor. This unit comes with the faster system bus, 533 MHz, 512 MB of DDR SDRAM, a DVD-RW and dual 80 GB hard drives. The hard drives can be configured as two separate drives or as a mirror image of each other, which is a nice way to protect from the disaster of a crashed hard drive.

The desktop version has all the expansion ports you can imagine, plus two extra USB ports on the front side of the tower. The ports are well labeled and it's easy to hook up just about anything.

The unit I tested sells for $1,299, which is a fair price for its features and specs. But the line already has a newer model. Last month, the store introduced the FT9100PE.

This unit should sizzle, especially for digital media or gaming applications. Tests of computers with this processor show they are capable of doing two tasks at once and give a throughput speed up to 40 percent faster. The vpr Matrix FT9100PE sells for $1,899.

One thing is for sure. This is not your father's house brand. Best Buy has broken the mold to offer a top of the line alternative to national brands.