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.

An old standard, but one that still provides decent performance at a great price.

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.

Nothing incredible in terms of design, but it’s an impressively cheap way to get quad-core in your PC.

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 Athlon XP 3200+ will probably be the last Barton-core desktop processor to come from AMD before the launch later this year of the Athlon 64, its desktop 64-bit processor.

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.

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.

ABIT's new NVIDIA nForce2 motherboard, the NF7-S, supports the AMD Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP, and also features dual 400MHz DDR memory controllers.

nVidia GeForce 256

Back in November we wondered just what you could buy for $1500 and Modtech and PC Express showed us two near identical systems (the latter being A-Listed). This month’s submission from PC Market offered few surprises.

The $1000 PC was once regarded as the Holy Grail of computing, but now almost every manufacturer has one.

Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now

Another notebook to embrace the entertainment market and sell units with widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio displays, this PowerNote packs some serious hardware under the hood, pushing not only AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor, but also ATI's Mobility RADEON 9700 a 60GB, 7200rpm hard disk drive and a multiformat 4-speed DVD burner for disc creation on the go.

Fastest PC

Like the KT4 Ultra, the ASUS A7V8X is an Athlon XP board that uses the VIA KT400 chipset. It packs in a truckload of extras, such as Serial ATA, FireWire, Gigabit LAN, AGP 8X and even RAID.

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).

A cheap, lightweight choice for single-core applications, but you get the performance you pay for.

A world first on the desktop, Phenom is good but a long way from outstanding.

Shuttle is a bit of a pioneer in the world of barebones PCs, and is one of few manufacturers to have a range of systems on offer and not just a couple of basic units. Its also the only one in this roundup to offer a barebones based around the new Athlon 64.