Fantastic design and highly-configurable power make this XPS useful, desirable and good value.

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

Quad-core makes it powerful and good value at the price. Noise and stability suffer though.

Custom design watercooling and some judicious overclocking make for a showstopping performance and price.

Nvidia’s 8800 GTX graphics card is the crowning glory of this very-fast, great-value, PC.

Not great value for money, but the XPS 700 offers plenty of power and striking looks.

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

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

The dual-core version of AMD's premium FX-series enters the game, and nothing can stand in its way.

The system as a whole looks great and we can't find a weak spot.

Supreme quality and performance at a supreme price.

Look what four grand can buy you.

A good-value and very powerful system that will appeal to those seeking ultimate performance.

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

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.

Our poor receptionist didn’t quite know what to do when Altech’s monolithic machine turned up. She had a point.

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.

As far as performance is concerned, the Emagen Lightspeed XPS is a fairly competitive offering. It sits in the middle of the pack as far as price is concerned, but managed to sit at second to third place in most benchmarks - it even came top of the class in 3DMark05. The 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 certainly helped there. And the fact that it’s $600 cheaper than the Pioneer system also works in its favour.

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 cheapest system to be submitted for review in our performance roundup, it just goes to show that even $4000 will get you a hell of a lot of PC for your money. PCQUEST has also opted to go with a CoolerMaster case, both for its attractive looks and functionality, this housing able to hold a massive five optical drives and four hard disk drives, erring on the side of more is better.