Everything you need to know about maxing-out your broadband connection, including interleaving, fine tuning MTU settings, firmware updates, ADSL filters and splitters,and that old chestnut - electrical noise in your wiring

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

Everything you need to know about AM2 -- without the headache.

An expensive board, but a fascintating way of getting a powerful, quiet system, especially if you're prepared to tweak.

A beautifully tiny computer-on-a-board that you should only consider if you have a specific use in mind

Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now

Clever corner cutting gives us an affordable, upgradeable performer.

We test AMD’s first quad-core processor for both speed and power efficiency

Despite the processor industry being driven for so long by the now dispelled 'Megahertz Myth', AMD's budget conscious 1.833GHz Sempron 2600+ CPU put in an very good showing.

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.

Chipmaker formulates cautious response to AMD's open socket.

Based around the SiS655 chipset, the MSI 655 MAX-FISR is a well-rounded Socket 478 motherboard.

Synonymous with cost effective CPUs, Intel's Celeron has carved a market for itself by producing products which are reliable and boast something many others cannot – interoperability. This has been achievable by producing products that work with the same socket 478 pin configuration found across the entire range of processors.

Four USB ports on the rack also turn it into a useful powered hub

Two-way and four-way servers celebrate new Sun and Intel love-in.

An HDMI-equipped board ideal for small media-centre systems

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 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.