A stunning design backed up by great performance and good value for money.

A poor performer in the face of HP’s similarly-priced, touch screen-enabled rival.

A flexible and powerful livingroom PC that ticks almost all the right boxes, as well as being great value.

Eye-catching and very well designed, the new iMac is an excellent all-in-one PC system.

An adequate Media Centre PC, but Asus’ competitor blows it out of the water.

Fast and good value. Gamers and power users will like it.

Some will prefer it to TI’s system, but a few quirks see it finishing in second place.

A very fast computer with decent features at a great price, whether for gaming or an all-round powerhouse

The dual-core version of AMD's premium FX-series enters the game, and nothing can stand in its way.

The system as a whole looks great and we can't find a weak spot.

Look what four grand can buy you.

A good-value and very powerful system that will appeal to those seeking ultimate performance.

The two-and-a-half thousand dollar price point is a popular one for PC systems.

Aztec’s PC is a very different take on our $4000 PC A-List challenge.

We put out the call to Australia’s white box PC manufacturers for a good high-end $4000 PC and PC Express was the first to respond.

One of the most striking things about Pioneer’s entry this month is the cosmetics: it’s 24hr karaoke bar meets street-racing BMW. And lots of blue LEDs! And these LED’s can get a little annoying – especially the super bright “headlight” LED’s. They shine directly ahead, and at desk height they beam straight into your eyes. There is also a large, illuminated ‘Xfinity’ etched into the front door of the case. Suffice to say this case won’t be to everyone’s taste. But otherwise, the rest of the externals are OK – the top mount houses two of the six total USB ports beneath a tidy flap, and a large power button with a good action.

As far as performance is concerned, the Emagen Lightspeed XPS is a fairly competitive offering. It sits in the middle of the pack as far as price is concerned, but managed to sit at second to third place in most benchmarks - it even came top of the class in 3DMark05. The 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 certainly helped there. And the fact that it’s $600 cheaper than the Pioneer system also works in its favour.

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.

The ASUS is one tough little cookie. Its cover and palmrest are encased in brushed aluminium lending the unit a reassuring sense of rigidity and roadworthiness. The 15.4" screen is bright, and its default resolution of 1680x1050 makes text sharp but a little small to read unless up close. The unit also comes with a built in TV-tuner, and also sports a TV-antenna output.

Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume. Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture.