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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another notebook to embrace the entertainment market and sell units with widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio displays, this PowerNote packs some serious hardware under the hood, pushing not only AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor, but also ATI's Mobility RADEON 9700 a 60GB, 7200rpm hard disk drive and a multiformat 4-speed DVD burner for disc creation on the go.

This pre-production notebook was shipped to us in a professional looking silver lockable briefcase. We were expecting to see top secret government papers rather than a slimline ultra low voltage (ULV) notebook.

We love hardware. As users ourselves we feel your pangs of wanting the newest, fastest rig and components. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the cost of bleeding-edge hardware at the best of times - more so with the cost of single graphics cards at times exceeding the $1000 price barrier. This is as much as some users would spend on a total system upgrade.