Custom design watercooling and some judicious overclocking make for a showstopping performance and price.

Any way you look at it, ITC’s Millennia 7350 is a monster.

The Pioneer DreamBook Power 900 is a locally built monster – this isn’t a desktop replacement, it’s a desk.

Alienware are fairly new to Australian shores, but for any PC-addict it's been hard to avoid their familiar little-green-men styling on the internet where Alienware cases are extremely popular among case-modding and PC-styling communities. They're finally here now, and the Area-51m 7700 is the first product through the PC Authority Labs doors.

A decent PC with media abilities bolted on, transforming this into a good lounge machine.

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.

The cheapest system to be submitted for review in our performance roundup, it just goes to show that even $4000 will get you a hell of a lot of PC for your money. PCQUEST has also opted to go with a CoolerMaster case, both for its attractive looks and functionality, this housing able to hold a massive five optical drives and four hard disk drives, erring on the side of more is better.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

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.

The Excel G736 notebook from Protac is a desktop replacement, and as well as better-than-normal notebook specifications it also comes with the other traditional trapping of a desktop replacement notebook: it's big, it's chunky, and it's heavy.

If laptops were cars, then the Pioneer Power 470 would be a caravan - a quick scan of the specs reveals that it has almost everything. The 470 model we tested was a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 unit with a large 60GB of drive space and 256MB of DDR.

Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.

Hi-Grade's new performance-oriented notebook is equipped with a 3.06GHz desktop P4, 60GB HDD, and a gigabyte of RAM. The Ultinote 6600DH displays Hi-Grade's typically first-rate build quality, with solid casing and a good quality TFT screen.

After January's shenanigans with this system, it's nice to have it back in the testing Labs. My initial impressions haven't changed: this is one mean system that will handle anything you throw at it, and the benchmarks back that claim.