Despite the processor industry being driven for so long by the now dispelled 'Megahertz Myth', AMD's budget conscious 1.833GHz Sempron 2600+ CPU put in an very good showing.

The creme de la creme of Athlon 64 products, the 4000+ is a socket 939 CPU with all the bells and whistles. This bad boy clocks in at 2.4GHz, features a 1MB L2 cache and 2GB HyperTransport memory interconnect to work in conjunction with its on-die memory controller.

In the performance stakes the 3200+ came up trumps, finishing middle to top of the pack and clearly cementing itself as a solid performing processor for home, office or pure entertainment.

Synonymous with cost effective CPUs, Intel's Celeron has carved a market for itself by producing products which are reliable and boast something many others cannot – interoperability. This has been achievable by producing products that work with the same socket 478 pin configuration found across the entire range of processors.

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.

The FX-55 is AMD's top performer. It's a 2.6GHz beast that will eat through current and future games and applications. Its architecture is based on that of the FX-53, which in turn was based on the first generation FX-51, and AMD has come a long way in bringing 64-bit to the desktop.

Designed with portability in mind, this notebook is slim, sexy and versatile, enabling basic office usage, DVD playback or even some weekend gaming.

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.

Your PC is only as good as your last upgrade, and this is truer than ever with current gaming and software applications milking machines for everything they're worth.

Legend QDI

While AMD has been waving hybrid 32/64-bit CPUs for some time now, speculation has risen over when Intel would unleash their product onto an already expecting market. Here it is, Intel's newest addition to their Extreme Edition clocking in at an impressive 3.73GHz and boasting a 2MB L3 cache.

This notebook has been designed with classic Sony style: rounded edges, hidden IO inputs and a sleek widescreen footprint. From a connectivity point of view, this 'book has it all, boasting front-mounted Memory Stick Pro port, iLink 4-pin FireWire port and three USB ports.

When Intel announced the production of 90nm products over a year ago, the most obvious change was the move to double the existing 512KB L2 cache to a full 1MB of on die memory. This simple transition added more performance than some of the minor clockspeed increases to date, and made the Prescott a household name.

We love hardware. As users ourselves we feel your pangs of wanting the newest, fastest rig and components. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the cost of bleeding-edge hardware at the best of times - more so with the cost of single graphics cards at times exceeding the $1000 price barrier. This is as much as some users would spend on a total system upgrade.

A fantastic specification notebook with all the trimmings you'd expect to find on more expensive notebooks, the Joybook 8100-V13 has a 15.4in widescreen WXGA with native 1280 x 800 resolution. With ATI's Mobility RADEON 9600 graphics, boasting 64MB dedicated video memory, it's great for DVD playback or gaming -- the unit returned 9,502 marks under 3DMark01SE Pro, more than enough to provide comfortable gameplay with a decent number of fps even in recent games. BenQ has gone as far as to include not just a DVD-ROM for DVD movie playback, but an optical DVD writer, capable of 2-speed DVD+R media writing, ideal for both business archiving or for personal backup.

The first Dothan notebook to roll off the rank, we were interested to see exactly how much real-world gain Intel is offering in its revised Centrino platform.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

Wrapped in an attractive silver chassis, this sexy looking notebook is easy on the eye, and features all of the latest gadgets. The left-hand side of the machine features the usual legacy parallel and DB9 monitor out for use with an external monitor, although both are hidden beneath a rubber cover so as not to ruin the smooth clean lines of this housing.

While we wait with bated breath for the imminent (or was that eventual?) release of Microsoft Media Centre into Australia, the number of companies cashing in on the media functionality of next generation consumer electronics is growing quickly.