A familiar plot – meddling with forces beyond our control – and some new weapons greet you as you once again enter the Mars UAC facility.

Given NVIDIA's close development with id Software on Doom 3 we weren't all that surprised to see a member of the undead emblazoned across the front of the packaging, but we were surprised to find a treat inside.

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.

For: Uses the Doom 3 engine so it'll run smoothly and look nice. Attempts to be original.Against: Fails to be original. Succeeds at being a funless parody of the genrel imparts no sense of achievement.

As one of the first native PCI-Express cards, the 6600GT has generated quite a bit of excitement: finally, a mid-price card that promises close to high end performance. So the fact that the card is finally available in AGP is good news for those willing to keep their existing AGP kit.

Unfortunately, Sparkle's 6800GT was the only card available for this Labs, and we can't compare this apples to apples with the rest of the cards in the pack. But, we couldn't let it go untested so we compared this to the rest of the field for each benchmark, which gives an indication of its advantage over the other cards through both synthetic and real-world tests.

The notebook winner this month was a close call. Two units stood out as being at the top of the multimedia field: the Pioneer D47K and the Acer Aspire 1802WSM. Feature-by-feature they were very closely matched, but we chose the Pioneer for several reasons, one of which was its advanced media capabilities.

For a company whose only other major release was the original Half Life, Valve has pushed the boundaries with fresh, bold gameplay that stays true to the legendary legacy.

The world is Paragon City, in which costumed heroes patrol the skies or walk the streets.

The Samsung M40 plus is a slick and stylish notebook, but unfortunately just doesn’t cut it compared to the others on test here.

Where XFX rose early with the DirectX 8 tests and dropped off in the DirectX 9.0 tests, this card did the exact opposite - it jumped up five places to the middle of the pack in 3DMark05.

Anyone with $400 to spend on a graphics card should currently be looking at a RADEON X800 XL. It boasts the same 16 pipelines as an X800 XT, and also packs 256MB of GDDR3 memory to boot.

The Omega Viewmaster Portiva 5Z71 is another notebook comprising of tradeoffs; the blistering Pentium-M 2GHz processor offset by an NVIDIA GeForce Go660 graphics card with only 64MB of video memory, accompanied by the smallest hard drive of the bunch.

ABIT's take on the X700 chipset was the least expensive by a good margin of the three we received. In our benchmarks, it topped 3DMark01, and even outperformed the speedier 6600GT's.

Leadtek's 6600GT offering was a mixed bag this month. It didn't handle our DirectX 8 tests too well, but 3DMark05 saw a complete about face to see it sit in first.

The GeCube is a good performer -- of the standard X800 XT's it produced the highest 3DMark05 score of 1024 x 768. Most current games require full DirectX 9.0 support to be played at their best, so a good 3DMark05 score means this willhandle the newest games -- at least until DirectX 10 appears.

At its very reasonable price, the Excalibur 9200 is ideal for anyone on a budget or in search of an upgrade.

Dare we say the near-perfect strategy game? A royal treat for history addicts.

A little over a year has passed since releasing the GeForce 6800, and right on cue, NVIDIA’s new chip is hitting town in the form of the GeForce 7800 GTX.

The X700 is a relative newcomer to the PCI Express fold, and was released by ATI in response to NVIDIA's 6600 chipset. When comparing all the X700 cards that we received, we found each had its own pro's and con's, and this made them all decent propositions.