Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.

The Inspiron 630m is Dell’s first 14-inch widescreen notebook.

We're doing our best to champion Australia's home grown White Box market.

Dell's 6400 is a great value mid-range notebook with very few weaknesses. The support is the icing on the cake.

There was very little to separate the top two but this month there was very little disgrace in finishing second for Samsung.

The Quadro FX3000 is based on the same NV35 core that powers the latest GeForce FX 5900 cards, but with a few new additions to cater to the professional market. Compared to the older Quadro FX2000, which was based on the NV30, or GeForce FX5800, the FX3000 has double the memory, at 256MB, as well as a 256-bit memory interface, giving double the theoretical graphics bandwidth, hitting just over 27GB/s. It also supports other features from the NV35, including a 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128-bit colour, 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy, 16x full-scene anti-aliasing, 3D volumetric textures, and of course support for all the latest OpenGL, DirectX and NVIDIA’s own Cg graphics language versions.

Blu-Ray notebooks are the next battleground, and the good news is they're slowly getting cheaper. ASUS is staking a claim with this monstrously powerful behemoth.

Gorgeous, expensive and exasperating in equal measure, and yet still desirable despite its myriad faults

Not perfect, but the best all-rounder.