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.

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.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

Locating the sweet spot in the market for well kitted out machines on a budget, Pioneer has come to the party by introducing it's Power PC model, featuring all the tech goodies without the sour aftertaste of a high price ticket. This black futuristic PC looks quite schmick with its front mounted LCD readout displaying up to date temperature information on the system, so you know exactly what's happening with your cooling.

Housed in a fairly attractive albeit plain chassis, this machine comes shipped with performance where it counts as well as plenty of potential for the tweakers and serial upgraders. A Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor is impressive enough for a system with a price tag under $2,500, but to also include a DVD burner, TFT display, good quality 2.1 speaker set up and wireless keyboard and mouse combo is previously unheard of.

IBM has a well-earned reputation within the corporate sector for providing exceptional quality desktop workstations. Their latest model – the ThinkCentre S50, is set to keep that reputation on track.

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.

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.

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.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

Businesses have come to rely on Acer workstations for their stability and usability without a huge price tag, and this system easily fulfills these requirements.

It isn't an add-on, a mod or a new way of playing the world's most popular online shooter. Counter-Strike: Source is the same game that's known, loved and often responsible for gamers sitting motionless for days on end. But it's now been ported to Valve's new 3D engine, the Source engine, giving us our first glimpse of the technology that will be powering Half-Life 2.

Dan Chiappini shows you how to get the most out of your graphics cards, without ever picking up a soldering iron.

The tightest firewall and administration system is all for naught if an employee walks away from their PC without locking it up.

With the same type of easily removable tool-less housing as the ThinkCentre S50 this HP machine can be stripped and rebuilt very quickly, which will appeal to the corporate IT techs and SMEs wishing to avoid lengthy hardware failure downtime.

Swiping the hardware from the PC Authority test bench, we went about putting together our Shuttle XPC. Immediately we were confronted by one of the idiosyncrasies of small form factor PCs: squeezing all the hardware in the tiny space inside.

When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

It's inside that you find a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 3GHz processor with an 800MHz FSB, plus a gig of DDR400 RAM in dual-channel configuration.

A fantastic specification notebook with all the trimmings you'd expect to find on more expensive notebooks, the Joybook 8100-V13 has a 15.4in widescreen WXGA with native 1280 x 800 resolution. With ATI's Mobility RADEON 9600 graphics, boasting 64MB dedicated video memory, it's great for DVD playback or gaming -- the unit returned 9,502 marks under 3DMark01SE Pro, more than enough to provide comfortable gameplay with a decent number of fps even in recent games. BenQ has gone as far as to include not just a DVD-ROM for DVD movie playback, but an optical DVD writer, capable of 2-speed DVD+R media writing, ideal for both business archiving or for personal backup.

When we sent out the call for multimedia systems we were expecting notebooks and PCs capable of DVD playback and some basic gaming. Pioneer not only cleared this bar with their submission - they raised it.