To kick-start the series we're going to begin, as it were, at the top – with the fine art of motherboard and CPU installation. Whether you're building your machine anew, or upgrading your current one with more powerful components, the following guide will help make installing these two key components a breeze.

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.

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.

All the acronyms and obscure new technologies got you in a jargon jumble? Tim Dean busts it up to help us make sense of it all.

Will splashing out on expensive RAM make a real difference to PC performance? And if so, how much should you buy? We supply the benchmarks and lay the details bare

Rumours of an ASUS -Gigabyte takeover scotched, but this is the next best thing.

With the increasing size of operating systems, games and the broadband smorgasbord of music and movies, it's just a matter of time before that dreaded message box pops up to tell you just how little space you have left.

While its a relatively simple task to install peripheral cards into a fully assembled PC, its a different story to actually construct a PC from scratch. Like every venture where some assembly is requi

Choosing a CPU for your PC isn’t an easy task. Here are our picks for budget, mid-range and high-end systems.

The number of manufacturers supporting AMD solutions has increased enormously of late, but despite the competition Asus has remained one of the best. The A7M266 is a good example of why this is so, fe

The choice of motherboard is also very important, because its the nervous system of your PC, communicating with all the peripherals, memory and processor. Look for a healthy number of PCI slots (five

Last year the Pentium 4 was beginning to show its true colours as a top performance desktop CPU, but it was still squarely outmatched in the value stakes by the new Athlon processor. DDR RAM was also becoming the standard, with SDRAM finally going the way of the extinct plankton, graptolites.

Motherboards. The Labs this month is absolutely filled to the brim with them. Not only do we have our massive motherboard Labs, but with all the testing needed for our upgrade feature, the Labs team have been knee deep in components all month. As such, we’ve hereby dubbed this month 'Australian International Month of the Mobo’ in the Labs. Ahh, it all took me back to my Labs days of fiddling with SIMMs, DIMMs and RIMMs, probing BIOSes and hacking the registry to get stubborn drivers and benchmarks to work…

The humble beige box is an area of PC hardware that many people overlook. However, the quality of system cases varies significantly, and a bad design can cause no end of problems in the long run. Unfo

So you want to make yourself a new gaming rig, one that’s capable of playing Crysis at more than two frames per second, but won’t blow the budget?

Nick Ross straps himself to ATI’s would-be SLI killer and asks does it deliver the goods?

The P45 chipset takes the stability of the P35 chipset and introduces support for PCI Express 2.0 - the latest standard for graphic cards. If you were waiting for the best choice of upgrade for an existing LGA775 system, or want a board for a budget system, this is definitely the chipset of choice. It's great time to bag an upgrade. What better gift for the DIY geek in your household?

Cutting edge technology is bringing powerful enterprise-grade solutions to the small and medium business sector. Read on for tips, analysis and tutorials about how you can take advantage.

Possibly the most interesting feature of the Xbox is its similarity to a PC in terms of its hardware specification. Unlike other games consoles, like the Sony PlayStation2 and Nintendo GameCube, which

Our full guide to saving cash-saving secrets is here, from how to get discounts on PCs, to SIM only phone contracts, the best DSLR cameras deals, and discount licensing from Adobe, Microsoft and others.