This motherboard is a promising appetiser – although the real meal is yet to come.

A great way to extend your desktop once you’re out of DVI ports

A vibrant gaming LCD, but it becomes jarring in everyday use

Graphics card manufacturers’ obsession with multi-GPU boards continues this month. The Asus HD 3850 X2 brings to market the novel formula of two ATi Radeon 3850 GPUs on one card.

A feast of features for those willing to pay

A high-end board bristling with great ideas

Lite-On’s DVD writer was our A-List choice for almost a year. At the time we said it was practically perfect – offering compatibility with every format, plus Lightscribe, for a bargain price. But Asus has managed to trump it.

Vivid colours and some interesting extras make this the perfect entertainment-focused LCD

An HDMI-equipped board ideal for small media-centre systems

Despite sitting in third place for write speeds and fourth overall for the read portion of our testing, this drive has a couple of trump cards up its sleeves.

Like the KT4 Ultra, the ASUS A7V8X is an Athlon XP board that uses the VIA KT400 chipset. It packs in a truckload of extras, such as Serial ATA, FireWire, Gigabit LAN, AGP 8X and even RAID.

The board's ability to increase CPU core voltage in 0.025V increments as well as adjustable FSB/DDR ratio with fixed AGP/PCI frequencies allows for maximum performance with absolute control.

The A7N8X Deluxe features dual-LAN ports, which allows you to connect to a broadband service and share it without the need for a separate PCI network card.

As with all the GeForce3 Ti cards the ASUS V8200 T2 Deluxe features two new additions to the NVIDIA nfiniteFX engine...

A useful card for more relaxed gaming, and a quiet cooler to boot.

Great audio, but gaming ability hinges on the success of Dolby and DTS

The world’s first punch-proof LCD is here, but only time will tell if there’s a market for it.

Packed with extras to target some of Vista’s interesting new features, but it isn’t quite the marvel we were hoping for.

Impressive speakers and sleek styling help to compensate for the average image quality.

An exciting glimpse at future performance, but by the time games appear to make them worth buying, the price will have plummeted.