Dell’s first foray into using AMD processors is a modest performer, but fair value.

It’s expensive, but Baddog’s Lanbox comes with personality and outstanding support.

Whisper quiet, well built and well designed, but a lack of power and expandability will keep enthusiasts away.

Back in November we wondered just what you could buy for $1500 and Modtech and PC Express showed us two near identical systems (the latter being A-Listed). This month’s submission from PC Market offered few surprises.

Aztec’s PC is a very different take on our $4000 PC A-List challenge.

Producing a PC for under a thousand dollars will inevitably lead to compromises – do you go for a better screen or more processing power?

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

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was launched with quite a bit of fanfare late last year, and not least of all because it was the first time in its 18 month life Australians could buy systems based on the OS.

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.

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.

The iMac has always been a little more about style than function and the latest iteration is testament to this philosophy. The most noticeable thing about the iMac G5 is the massive 20 inch widescreen. It's a Big Mac. Geddit?

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

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.

Locating the sweet spot in the market for well kitted out machines on a budget, Pioneer has come to the party by introducing it's Power PC model, featuring all the tech goodies without the sour aftertaste of a high price ticket. This black futuristic PC looks quite schmick with its front mounted LCD readout displaying up to date temperature information on the system, so you know exactly what's happening with your cooling.

Housed in a fairly attractive albeit plain chassis, this machine comes shipped with performance where it counts as well as plenty of potential for the tweakers and serial upgraders. A Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor is impressive enough for a system with a price tag under $2,500, but to also include a DVD burner, TFT display, good quality 2.1 speaker set up and wireless keyboard and mouse combo is previously unheard of.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

The processor struggle continues between AMD and Intel as the war rages on for the top ranking of the market share table. Interestingly enough, of the four machines this month under the $2,500 price tag, Scorpion Technology's Z-Box was the only unit to feature an AMD Althon XP processor. Also interesting was the marginal gains achieved by Intel given their obvious clock speed advantages over this unit.

The Athlon64 has only been out a short while, and although it's an excellent processor, from all accounts it's not selling as well as it should be.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.

Designed from the ground up with gamers in mind, GameVision has produced a fine looking and practical system with plenty of potential. The system is built around Intel’s now legendary 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ’C’ stepping processor, one of the most overclockable chips available on the market. With substantiated overclocks of up to 3.6GHz with stock air-cooling, these unassuming CPUs are powerhouses of frequency, if you know how to milk the most from them.