CPU

To kick-start the series we're going to begin, as it were, at the top – with the fine art of motherboard and CPU installation. Whether you're building your machine anew, or upgrading your current one with more powerful components, the following guide will help make installing these two key components a breeze.

All the acronyms and obscure new technologies got you in a jargon jumble? Tim Dean busts it up to help us make sense of it all.

Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

Run Windows apps on Linux by running Windows itself. Leigh Dyer shows you how.

Intel's Netburst might have become a retrospective embarrassment for the firm, but CPUs based on the best-forgotten architecture are apparently still hitting sky-high clock speeds.

Last year the Pentium 4 was beginning to show its true colours as a top performance desktop CPU, but it was still squarely outmatched in the value stakes by the new Athlon processor. DDR RAM was also becoming the standard, with SDRAM finally going the way of the extinct plankton, graptolites.

nVidia GeForce 256

Curious to see what powers the Nehalem and Core i7 architecture? We reveal the tech behind the fastest Intel-powered computer on the planet.

Designed from the ground up with gamers in mind, GameVision has produced a fine looking and practical system with plenty of potential. The system is built around Intel’s now legendary 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ’C’ stepping processor, one of the most overclockable chips available on the market. With substantiated overclocks of up to 3.6GHz with stock air-cooling, these unassuming CPUs are powerhouses of frequency, if you know how to milk the most from them.

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.

Intel's Atom platform may provide the backbone of today's netbooks, but with rivals emerging, Intel could find itself playing a smaller part in the future, as players such as Nvidia's Tegra take hold.

Nvidia’s latest graphics cards and chips throw down the gauntlet to Intel and AMD. Go behind the scenes with this guide to the big technologies including PhysX, CUDA, and games like Far Cry 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky.

Sun UltraSPARC In 1995, eight years after the first SPARC Station was introduced, Sun went 64-bit with the debut of its UltraSPARC I RISC processor; the first model ran at 143MHz and had 128-bi

Apple’s ads may be funny, but they’re woefully inaccurate. Here we reveal dozens of reasons why the PC outclasses the Mac.

Ever wondered what a particular acronym stands for? Find the answer in our comprehensive reference guide to computer industry acronyms. RTFM!

Chip maker AMD has unveiled the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, which it claims is the world's highest frequency quad-core desktop processor..

Unlike a silicon CPU, the brain isnt a synchronous device that needs regular clock pulses to keep its operations in step, but we can get a sense of its effective clock speed by seeing how long it take

Company claims world's most power efficient x86 CPU.

Chip giant Intel has announced that it would introduce a model numbering scheme across its consumer CPU range.