Performance PCs

In the market for a new gaming rig for playing the latest games? PC Authority has the answer to your gaming performance woes with five of the hottest machines around.

In the market for a new gaming rig for playing the latest games? PC Authority has the answer to your gaming performance woes with five of the hottest machines around.

When PC Authority went on sale in November 1997, one of the coverlines on our maiden issue was the optimistic but still cautious 'AGP - Graphics acceleration beyond your dreams?' Since this issue went on sale over seven years ago, more products than we could possibly count have been brought to market and reviewed by us. This includes two additional generations of CPU technology and we're looking at the end of the line for the AGP bus technology. AGP promised four times the bandwidth of PCI and has served us incredibly well. While all the major GPU manufacturers are still making products to support the format, PCI-Express is beginning to take flight and gain popularity with early adopters due to its scalable architecture and doubled bandwidth over 8x AGP. No doubt as the technology further evolves we'll see AGP go the way of PCI.

1997's Labs Speed award went to Gateway's $5099 beast of a system, boasting a 266MHz Pentium II processor - massive for the time, but now eclipsed by most PDAs, smartphones and some printers for raw Megahertz power. Today's systems feature 3GHz and above processors and 2GBs of DDR RAM.

This month we've taken five of the latest high performance rigs around and put them through their paces by running them head to head in a series of synthetic and real world game tests to work out exactly who has the real goods when it comes to all out performance. While PCs outdate at a rate of knots, for those with the money and the desire for bragging rights at having the fastest newest system going, this roundup is for you. Read on for a comprehensive guide to our testing methodologies and find out which systems are worth forking out for to give you the edge on the cyber-battlefield.

This Group Test appeared in the January, 2005 issue of PC & Tech Authority Magazine