Soltek, purveyor of all things shiny and glittery, is one of the first companies to release a motherboard based around Intel’s eagerly anticipated i865 Springdale chipset.

How could a motherboard possibly cost over $1,000? The short answer is: if it has everything built in. The 8KNXP is geared towards the server market, and is the only board in this Labs with an Ultra360 SCSI controller.

MSI's new motherboard is based on the Intel 865, or Springdale chipset, heralding the arrival of a host of new technologies (such as support for dual-channel DDR-RAM, AGP 8x and SATA) in Pentium 4 boards. These technologies have been commonplace in Althon boards for more than six months, and it's been an agonizing wait for many Pentium 4 fans.

Well and truly gone are the days of boring green and brown PCBs – and welcome to the yellow motherboard, care of Soltek.

The VIA KT400A chipset forms the foundation of the KT4A Ultra-FISR motherboard. Unlike the two other MSI boards in this roundup, the KT4A only supports SATA, and not IDE, RAID.

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.

When we think of SiS graphics, we usually think of low cost, low-end cards or integrated offerings for the entry-level 2D market, with the possibility of some rudimentary 3D capabilities thrown in.

Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

While not unfamiliar with barebones PCs and small components designed to take your PC out of the study and into the lounge room, the MSI MEGA PC is the first out-of-the-box system we've reviewed that would snuggle right in amongst your hi-fi components.

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.

The WinFast K7NCR18G-PROII has a well -rounded set of features, and besides the ABIT NF7-M, it is the only Socket-A board in our round up to offer support for a front side bus speed of 400MHz.

The Gigabyte SINXP1394 is a little pricey, but supports SATA, IDE RAID and Hyper-Threading, as well as FireWire

Built with convenience in mind, this board features six board-mounted USB 2.0 ports, and two more on a rear panel.

Not a bad tome to have in the computer room, the PC Repair Bench Book, by R Glister, is geared more towards the beginner tinkerer than the hardcore techie, but it's chock full of good information. Much more descriptive than "Upgrading and repairing PCs" (March 2003, page 63) but without the depth straight away, the PC Repair Bench Book is broken into 10 major sections.

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.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.