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 KYRO II chipset differs significantly from the other solutions on the market. It uses a technology known as tile-based rendering to achieve peak performance, rather then the brute force solutions employed by competing chips.

In the beginning 3dfx was the king of the 3D accelerator market with its Voodoo and Voodoo2 chipsets...

Although the mobile marketplace has been changing in the face of Centrino and the slow but gradual tablet PC adoption rate, large form factored (greater than single spindle) notebooks are still the order of the day.

VideoLogic is a name few people would now instantly associate with graphics accelerators. In fact, its parent company, Imagination Technologies, was present at the birth of the PC 3D accelerator field in June 1996 with its PowerVR card.

Samsung has made some noise recently about its MP3 players and this example is at the forefront of this product family.

There was once a time when 3dfx ruled the 3D accelerator market, but...

While AMD has been waving hybrid 32/64-bit CPUs for some time now, speculation has risen over when Intel would unleash their product onto an already expecting market. Here it is, Intel's newest addition to their Extreme Edition clocking in at an impressive 3.73GHz and boasting a 2MB L3 cache.

The GeForce3 chip is quite an incredible thing.

The future, they say, is based on the Internet and mobile computing.

The unusually named NOD32 is finding favour with a growing number of users despite its Spartan interface, which concentrates more on the nuts and bolts of the job at hand than trying to look good.

Voice E-mail is an add on to Maxiworks E-Mail Express (sold with the program). Priced at $32.95 without a microphone, or $49.95 with, there is no doubt that the program delivers what youd want in an email package, but there is a lack of sophistication thats generally expected in todays programs.

Good looking and easy to use, the Squeezebox is also well featured. The only downside is the price.

Packed with features like network capability and transparency scanning, it also has the best scanner by far, with great print quality too.

There is quite simply no holding nVidia back. Hot on the heels of the top-performance GeForce2 GTS chipset, with its capacity for up to 64Mb of fast DDR...

There are many things that are given the 'instant' moniker, but usually products from the IT world are not among their number. Slow PC boot times (whatever happened to instant-on PCs?) and a whole mess of configurations takes the instant gratification out of most technology...

Chance or coincidence? AMD releases the Athlon 64, specifically targeted at the consumer performance market, and only days later Intel announces a secret processor aimed squarely at the same MHz-hungry community: the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE).

Great real-time performance, particularly with high definition footage. But the EDIUS Pro software still needs a few more features to usurp the competition.

In the performance stakes the 3200+ came up trumps, finishing middle to top of the pack and clearly cementing itself as a solid performing processor for home, office or pure entertainment.

The only PC in our mini roundup this month to feature a rather boring beige case, it more than makes up for its looks with blistering performance at a very reasonable price. Inclusion of thumb screws will allow you to get at your hardware quickly and without the need for tools. Always handy for those of us that like to fiddle frequently.