Personally, I've found it's almost useless to compare PC's in different systems without looking closely at the # of components in the system, and the # of lines used to power the system.
A system which has 3 components (cd, pre, amp) plugged into one line, will always make the PC's sound 'different' than say a system with 5 components plugged into 2 lines (transport, room correction dsp, dac and preamp in one line, amp in the other).
Everything you plug into your ac lines changes the sound, even if it's not in the music signal chain. IMO, this makes evaluation and comparisons nearly impossible on a system-to-system basis. The most likely reason for some PC's getting rave reviews on many different systems, is that the systems aren't really that different, from an ac standpoint.
As someone who has spent many hundreds of hours evaluating PC's and ac line devices as research for my upcoming AC power cable introduction, let me tell you, it's VERY difficult to predict what a PC will sound like in a given system.