With so many factors to consider, choosing a motherboard can be a bewildering exercise. We put 11 models through their pace to find the ultimate in performance, flexibility and value

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.

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

All the current chipsets from both the big gaming guns – ATi and Nvidia – tested, reviewed and rated.

The first place to start tweaking is your BIOS. Enter your BIOS by hitting a key combination on system boot (look out for F1, Del etc). A word of warning though, the BIOS is a very powerful tool, but can cause damage if pushed the wrong way.

We put every current model from ATI and NVIDIA through its paces to find out which offers the best performance and value.

A lot has happened since our last graphics card Labs back in September 1999. Back then the nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra was starting to give 3dfx a hard time, and the Matrox Millennium G400 MAX was showing

The graphics market is a cutthroat game, and we have seen many casualties recently. Not all of them have been fatal, like Matrox, which has recently backed out of the consumer race, or Rendition, whic

Hard drives used to be the coolest thing - in the olden days, when all home PCs were slow, a hard drive was often a measure of how 'good' your computer was. For quite sometime, however, processor and graphics technology stole the limelight. Hard drives have been taken for granted - an ambient component that accompanies your sparkling graphics card and gi-normous heat sink.

Since the launch of PC Authority magazine 30 issues ago, we have placed an emphasis on the concept of computing in the real world. This means that all the PC hardware that passes through our Labs is t

Notebooks have been an essential tool for the workforce for years and are becoming a popular entertainment platform. While it’s rare that you’ll find a portable workstation that provides enough grunt for gaming, Intel may just have the answer with its new breed of mobile technolgy – Sonoma.

Unlike many of our performance-based Labs, business workstations are a whole different world of PCs, focusing not on the maximum number of frames per second, or how many overall points they can churn out in any given benchmarking utility.

Benchmarking PCs is a tricky business. You need to ensure that you stress the systems, but also that the results you get will be relevant in the real world. Previously we have relied heavily on BAPCo's SYSmark2002 for simulating home and office use, with programs such as Excel, Word, Outlook, and web content through Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Dreamweaver. However, due to SYSmark's history of instability as well as the sheer length of time it takes to complete a run, we have put it on the backburner in favour of PCMark04 for this Labs.

The Labs team delves into the guts of this month’s motherboards, and points out what you need to know to chose the right one for your needs.

How much notebook will $2500 actually buy you? The PC Authority Labs team investigates.

The PC Authority Labs team runs about a million benchmarks and looks under the hood of the latest generation of GPUs to find which one's the best.

There are two areas to look at when testing laser printers: speed and print quality. We used a range of different documents to test the different aspects of each and weighted the results to give the Quality and Speed scores. More detail on each test is also provided online at www.pcauthority.com.au.

We test nine devices, from the simplest printers to versatile multifunction devices that print, scan, copy and fax

Print, scan and copy with one device; we round up six of the best all-in-ones.

Finding a good PC or notebook for the family is not as hard as you might think. PC Authority  puts the latest models to the test.