Gigabyte's new Canterwood-based GA-8KNXP is, without a doubt, one of the most full-featured motherboards we've ever seen. It incorporates all of the basics offered by the MSI 865PE Neo2 (see below) plus more. The differences between the older 845 and new 865 (Springdale) and 875 (Canterwood) chipsets are primarily feature-based – the 875P is designed to be the ultra-high-end option for extreme power users. As such, it's more expensive but has more niche capabilities.

A monster PC thanks to some very high-end components. But it’s noisy and expensive.

A very fast, well-built high-end PC. But a few niggles and high price keep it off the A-List.

Very fast, but the top-end components offer poor value in the face of competition.

Designed to sit between the low-end Inspiron and high-end XPS families, it comes in 15in and 17in flavours and its target audience could be pretty much anyone: few laptops are as customisable as this.

Excellent features and performance, but it’s pricey and you need a suitably powerful PC to make the most of it.

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

Director 8 Shockwave Studio is now the platform of choice for those sites determined to provide the richest possible Web experience

A diverse family including some stellar CPUs and numerous also-rans.

A diverse family including some stellar CPUs and numerous also-rans

The arrival of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (ES2K3) is a significant event in the history of this product. First, it brings to a close the second era of the codebase. Released back in 1996 on the NT 4 wave, ES4 (there was no 1, 2 or 3) brought enterprise-level email, contact management, diary management and so forth to the Windows Server platform in a new and comprehensive BackOffice application.

A very fast computer with decent features at a great price, whether for gaming or an all-round powerhouse

We put out the call to Australia’s white box PC manufacturers for a good high-end $4000 PC and PC Express was the first to respond.

QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing.

Two of the oldest standards in the book join forces to try and spell the end of long, expensive VGA cable extensions.

Intel’s new range of desktop processors has been a long time coming, but at last it’s arrived - and it leaves all others in the dust

TI's current workstation-class 3D graphics accelerators - dubbed X1 - are the company's latest effort to keep a hand in the high-end 3D graphics market. Consumer-level 3D hardware is now massively powerful, of course, but for all-out 3D performance and rock-solid driver integration you need a card dedicated to the purpose, and ATI claims the X1-128 is it.

Both of these systems offer immense flexibility and decent value for money, although the Intel version wins out.

Powerful, well price and a worthy addition to the A-List. The PacStar Core i7 is a PC we wouldn't be unhappy to take home and spend the weekend gaming on

A fast, quiet, good-looking PC that's great value.