For a company whose only other major release was the original Half Life, Valve has pushed the boundaries with fresh, bold gameplay that stays true to the legendary legacy.

Housed in a fairly attractive albeit plain chassis, this machine comes shipped with performance where it counts as well as plenty of potential for the tweakers and serial upgraders. A Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor is impressive enough for a system with a price tag under $2,500, but to also include a DVD burner, TFT display, good quality 2.1 speaker set up and wireless keyboard and mouse combo is previously unheard of.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

The processor struggle continues between AMD and Intel as the war rages on for the top ranking of the market share table. Interestingly enough, of the four machines this month under the $2,500 price tag, Scorpion Technology's Z-Box was the only unit to feature an AMD Althon XP processor. Also interesting was the marginal gains achieved by Intel given their obvious clock speed advantages over this unit.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

We find this model hovering in the no-man's-land between desktop replacement and notebook. Its large form factor and huge screen come at the expense of weight, while the wireless and large battery do make it viable for users on the move.

It isn't an add-on, a mod or a new way of playing the world's most popular online shooter. Counter-Strike: Source is the same game that's known, loved and often responsible for gamers sitting motionless for days on end. But it's now been ported to Valve's new 3D engine, the Source engine, giving us our first glimpse of the technology that will be powering Half-Life 2.

While the Celeron's history is dotted with major successes, like the legendary Celeron 300A and overclockability, the name has remained a budget brand. Comparatively the CPU lacks features, with only 128KB of L2 cache to AMD's 256KB.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.

The FX-55 is AMD's top performer. It's a 2.6GHz beast that will eat through current and future games and applications. Its architecture is based on that of the FX-53, which in turn was based on the first generation FX-51, and AMD has come a long way in bringing 64-bit to the desktop.

The creme de la creme of Athlon 64 products, the 4000+ is a socket 939 CPU with all the bells and whistles. This bad boy clocks in at 2.4GHz, features a 1MB L2 cache and 2GB HyperTransport memory interconnect to work in conjunction with its on-die memory controller.

There are few boys, and likely some girls, too, that aren’t attracted to the idea of building a castle.

Gone are the innovations introduced in the first game – allowing the player to upgrade specific unit traits via the unit itself; the exciting feel of progressing from one epoch to another and general playability.

Synonymous with cost effective CPUs, Intel's Celeron has carved a market for itself by producing products which are reliable and boast something many others cannot – interoperability. This has been achievable by producing products that work with the same socket 478 pin configuration found across the entire range of processors.

For such a high specification machine with a large display, we didn’t have high expectations of battery life. We were wrong. Not only is this one of the best looking and functional notebooks we’ve played with in some time, but this notebook managed to stay operating at full load with a looping productivity test for well over three and a half hours – enough for students, road warriors and home users.

A familiar plot – meddling with forces beyond our control – and some new weapons greet you as you once again enter the Mars UAC facility.

Hallmark has opted to take advantage of Intel’s Extreme Graphics 2 integrated shared graphics, taking up to 64MB of video memory from the on-board 512MB of PC2700 DDR to power the display. While not designed for gaming, it did manage to churn out almost 3000 points in 3DMark01SE with some help from its Pentium M 1.6GHz CPU.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.