Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now

The original Audigy brought ASIO drivers, SB1394 (IEEE 1394) and EAX Advanced HD to the masses, but it was criticised because some people felt betrayed by the 24-bit 96kHz specification, which referred to the DACs rather than the sampling rate.

A diverse family including some stellar CPUs and numerous also-rans.

A diverse family including some stellar CPUs and numerous also-rans

This early Nforce 570 for Intel board lacks luxuries and speed compared to Intel chipsets, but boasts a good price.

Intel has been banging on about Centrino 2 lately, so it was good to finally get a chance to test the claims courtesy of a spanking new mid-range Centrino 2 M51 Va courtesy of ASUS.

Very fast, but the top-end components offer poor value in the face of competition.

We’ve had some great competitors knocking on the mid-range A-Listed door, but TI’s all-rounder wins through.

Performance per watt has taken a backward step, but it’s very fast with the right apps.

Valve may have missed the point of episodic gaming, but this is one of the best value gaming packs ever released

The move to a new platform brings credible new challengers to Intel’s Core 2 processors

A Vista-only release that's merely a port of an Xbox game. The charm's in the gameplay, not its Vista-centric nature.

Everything you need to know about AM2 -- without the headache.

Some will prefer it to TI’s system, but a few quirks see it finishing in second place.

Bose-s 3-2-1 is a 2.1 speaker DVD, CD and MP3 CD player whose claim to fame is the ability to produce accurate surround sound from just three speakers. Each satellite contains two discreet drivers that redirect audio in specific directions to mimic 5.1.

This first of a new generation is only a little faster than the old, but its potential is clearly huge

Very powerful and, with few features missing, it’s good value at the price.

A powerful and feature-packed notebook. But it can’t match the quality of Dell’s XPS M1710.

The Athlon XP 2700+ represents a significant leap forward for the Athlon line – it solves a long-term problem by stepping up the default frontside bus (FSB) speed from 266MHz to 333MHz. This means that the Athlon XP can finally run in sync with 333MHz DDR RAM. While most currently available Athlon motherboards support 333MHz DDR, there is virtually no performance boost between this and 266MHz DDR when running an Athlon XP with a 266MHz FSB. The extra speed offered by the RAM quite simply goes to waste, because the CPU can't keep up with it.