MOTHERBOARD

Motherboard

Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Looking more like a corporate slimline desktop than a barebones system, this unit features a Mini ITX motherboard while the large form allows for good component layout. Minimal overlap between the motherboard and optical drives allows for free working space even around the CPU and RAM.

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

Curious to see what powers the Nehalem and Core i7 architecture? We reveal the tech behind the fastest Intel-powered computer on the planet.

The CWS SuperPro S3 has some very nice components under the hood: its equipped with the fastest Athlon XP in this months crop (a 2100+), 512MB of PC2100 DDR and an 80GB HDD.

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

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?

The Barracuda ST3160023AS is a fair performer in our labs, ranking fourth and above average when it came to handling the binary.