The Gigabyte X800 offering is a strange beast. The accompanying package proclaimed it was a X800 XT PE (Platinum Edition), but further investigation found it to be a standard X800 XT.

The Gigabyte SINXP1394 is a little pricey, but supports SATA, IDE RAID and Hyper-Threading, as well as FireWire

You might be wondering why the Gigabyte 8PENXP costs $582.

Last month we reviewed Microsoft's Bluetooth-enabled keyboard and mouse (January 2002, page 52), and at $399 we deemed it more worthy as a Bluetooth starter kit than a wireless keyboard and mouse kit.

With Bluetooth-enabled devices taking off this year, (slowly, slowly), it's inevitable that more and more Bluetooth adaptors will appear on the market. We reviewed the Gigabyte GN-BTD01 (February 2003, page 44) and now the Belkin F8T001 USB Bluetooth adaptor.

How could a motherboard possibly cost over $1,000? The short answer is: if it has everything built in. The 8KNXP is geared towards the server market, and is the only board in this Labs with an Ultra360 SCSI controller.

This card was the second poorest performing X800 XT on show in 3DMark01SE's DirectX 8 tests, with roughly 400 3Dmarks between it and the Gigabyte RX80X256V. But DX8 testing certainly isn't everything these days, and ABIT's card put in a good showing to take fourth in the DirectX 9.0-based 3DMark05, putting it on par with the Labs winning PowerColor X800 XT and GeCube card.

This card performed well in 3DMark01SE, producing 14,739 3Dmarks and falling just behind the top performing AOpen in this category. Unfortunately, it fell slightly behind the competition in the 3DMark05 high stress test, and even fell behind two of the three X700Pro cards on test.

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.

When we think of SiS graphics, we usually think of low cost, low-end cards or integrated offerings for the entry-level 2D market, with the possibility of some rudimentary 3D capabilities thrown in.

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.

Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.