It’s one of the facts of the gaming hobbyist’s life: cutting edge games require cutting edge hardware. It’s as set in stone as Moore’s Law (which is itself now 40 years old). Every 12 to 18 months you need to upgrade or get left behind. Our contenders this month make a very good case for starting with a clean slate, and none more so than this month’s winner, the Modtech Civic-64FX.

Powered by an Intel Pentium-M 1.6GHz, the Modtech Civic Diamond 1600W Centrino notebook has a decent core specification, including a useful 512MB DDR RAM, 40GB of disk space and an ATI Mobility RADEON 9000 card offering 64MB of non-shared memory.

Absolutely blitzing the field, the Labs Winner this month wasn't a tough decision. Streaking ahead with its unbelievable feature set, the Civic 3200.dx went on to crush the other contenders with colossal performance scores.

The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

The AS2400DW picked up the Labs Winner award this month for several reasons.

With the exception of the badge on the lid, PC Club's Highlander is almost identical to both ModTech's and Targa's offerings.

Very narrowly pipped for the top placing Labs winner award this month, Plus offers an impressive performing gaming machine with all the bells and whistles you'd expect to find at this price point. Wrapped in the attractive Cooler Master Cavalier wave housing, there's no ultra portability to be found here. The clear advantage of moving away from small form factor housing is not being starved for space internally.

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.

Here at PC Authority we see a lot of computer systems. Not surprising really, it’s what we do. But it’s not often we see a system this carefully assembled. Every precaution has been taken to ensure the system has clear airflow to help regulate the temperature and keep it cool.

The second of three notebooks with identical bodies, designs, and almost identical specifications, the Targa Visionary 4E proved to be a powerhouse when it come to the PC Authority benchmark suite, ripping through SYSmark2002 and 3DMark2001SE Pro with ease.

As far as performance is concerned, the Emagen Lightspeed XPS is a fairly competitive offering. It sits in the middle of the pack as far as price is concerned, but managed to sit at second to third place in most benchmarks - it even came top of the class in 3DMark05. The 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 certainly helped there. And the fact that it’s $600 cheaper than the Pioneer system also works in its favour.

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.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.