With so many factors to consider, choosing a motherboard can be a bewildering exercise. We put 11 models through their pace to find the ultimate in performance, flexibility and value

The Labs team delves into the guts of this month’s motherboards, and points out what you need to know to chose the right one for your needs.

Intel’s three new CPUs promise Core i7 power in an economical and efficient package. We put them through their paces to see whether small really is beautiful

Evaluating barebones systems is quite different from performance-based testing using benchmarks. As such, we opted to do a feature-based roundup, covering all aspects of the hardware, including but not limited to: build quality, ease of install, and included feature sets.

Over a year ago, the PC Authority Labs team was speculating about the possible union of DDR-RAM with the Pentium 4 processor as an alternative to the problematic pairing with RDRAM. While many of the

Whether you're upgrading your existing PC or building one from scratch, the motherboard you choose is of pivotal importance.

If you equate the CPU as the brains of the PC then think of the motherboard as the nervous system, shuffling signals back and forth from the extremities of your PC. In exposing these 15 e

Small form factor PCs have been around for a while, and barebones PCs for even longer. Traditionally a barebones PC is a basic shell, including a case, power supply and motherboard at minimum, and occasionally tooled up with a few extras like RAM.

To test the TFTs in this month's Labs we relied on a few different methodologies. All TFTs were tested on the same test bench PC consisting of a Gigabyte 8GE667-PRO motherboard and 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 512MB of DDR RAM, running Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

The first place to start tweaking is your BIOS. Enter your BIOS by hitting a key combination on system boot (look out for F1, Del etc). A word of warning though, the BIOS is a very powerful tool, but can cause damage if pushed the wrong way.

Hard drives used to be the coolest thing - in the olden days, when all home PCs were slow, a hard drive was often a measure of how 'good' your computer was. For quite sometime, however, processor and graphics technology stole the limelight. Hard drives have been taken for granted - an ambient component that accompanies your sparkling graphics card and gi-normous heat sink.

Whether you're upgrading your existing PC or building one from scratch, the motherboard you choose is of pivotal importance.

While hard disk drive speed is commonly one of the last considerations when putting together a new machine, its importance is more than just a place to store your files and operating system.

Stuck for storage space? Upgrade to one of the latest disks and you’ll benefit from better performance too

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.

This month we’ve taken 12 of the fastest optical drives, run them through their paces and sorted the award winners from the less than impressive performers.

Christmas is a time where gifts are given and tradition dictates that the gift has to be a surprise. In keeping with tradition we sent invitations for manufacturers to submit a Christmas stocking fill

DDR (Double Data Rate) RAM is a relative newcomer to the PC as system memory, although it is certainly not a fledgling technology. Graphics cards, and other components that require much higher memory

Unlike many of our performance-based Labs, business workstations are a whole different world of PCs, focusing not on the maximum number of frames per second, or how many overall points they can churn out in any given benchmarking utility.

Since the launch of PC Authority magazine 30 issues ago, we have placed an emphasis on the concept of computing in the real world. This means that all the PC hardware that passes through our Labs is t