Ever wondered what a particular acronym stands for? Find the answer in our comprehensive reference guide to computer industry acronyms. RTFM!

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

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.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

When we think of SiS graphics, we usually think of low cost, low-end cards or integrated offerings for the entry-level 2D market, with the possibility of some rudimentary 3D capabilities thrown in.

VideoLogic is a name few people would now instantly associate with graphics accelerators. In fact, its parent company, Imagination Technologies, was present at the birth of the PC 3D accelerator field in June 1996 with its PowerVR card.

ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

In the workstation graphics market, the name 3Dlabs carries considerable weight, and its Wildcat III series of OpenGL cards continues to be dominating in the high-end workspace. However, in the mid-range sector, NVIDIAs Quadro2 and Quadro4, and ATIs FireGL 8800 have made serious inroads. The new Wildcat VP870 looks set to redress the balance, thanks to a brand-new GPU that takes programmability to a new level.

nVidia GeForce 256

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

The big feature that sets the 6200TC apart from the 6600's and 6800's is the addition of TurboCache. Currently, graphics cards are typically limited to the memory on the graphics card, but TurboCache opens the door to your PC's system memory.

Larrabee seens as Intel's response to AMD's ATI acquisition.

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.

The Quadro FX3000 is based on the same NV35 core that powers the latest GeForce FX 5900 cards, but with a few new additions to cater to the professional market. Compared to the older Quadro FX2000, which was based on the NV30, or GeForce FX5800, the FX3000 has double the memory, at 256MB, as well as a 256-bit memory interface, giving double the theoretical graphics bandwidth, hitting just over 27GB/s. It also supports other features from the NV35, including a 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128-bit colour, 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy, 16x full-scene anti-aliasing, 3D volumetric textures, and of course support for all the latest OpenGL, DirectX and NVIDIA’s own Cg graphics language versions.

A powerful high-end suite with a lot of potential. Make sure you have a high-end system to run it as the listed system requirements are very optimistic.

1980 Sinclair Producing everything from electric cars to home computers, Clive Sinclair was the 1980s embodiment of English eccentric genius. While Americas kids wiled away t

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.

The PixelView range of graphics cards share a sizeable proportion of the OEM market, with many of the small-to-medium PC vendors using them to outfit their PCs with inexpensive graphics solutions.