Absolutely blitzing the field, the Labs Winner this month wasn't a tough decision. Streaking ahead with its unbelievable feature set, the Civic 3200.dx went on to crush the other contenders with colossal performance scores.

If you're a performance junkie, there's plenty in this roundup to tempt you, but if your life depends on that extra edge or getting those crucial extra few frames per second, stop searching right now.

The Civic 3200.dX placed first in every benchmark test we ran. It was noticeably better -- 580 marks ahead of its closest rival, the IntelliPro 3000GX from DigitalStar -- in real world testing with PCMark04's simulated physics calculations, media encoding and decoding and viral scanning.

Even Acer's RADEON 9800 PRO had to struggle to keep up with the Civic's blistering 3D speed, with the Civic coming out 1,500 3DMarks in front. The Civic's graphical prowess comes care of its 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO graphics and top-end high 3.2GHz CPU. This stand-out performance also contributed to the Civic's high value for money score.

But it wasn't just in performance that the Civic impressed the Labs team. While many suppliers saved money by using basic and unattractive cases, Modtech has built its system around an easy to access and attractive black tool-less ATX case, making tinkering and upgrading a breeze. Pop the latches and lift off the side panel and away you go. Thumbscrews also make case access easier compared to some of the others on offer this month.

For a display, Modtech has chosen to include a CRT instead of a TFT -- using the money saved to up the size to a big 19in model. This will please gamers especially, who will find the screen size and fast refresh of a CRT highly desirable. The downside is the extra space and power consumption used by the big screen.

Another sought after feature is the Pioneer DVR-106 DVD burner. This is a very versatile drive as it can burn to both primary DVD formats: DVD-R/-RW and DVD+R/+RW. This means you'll be sure to have a drive you can use for some time to come, and you can guarantee maximum compatibility when it comes to burning movies to be played in set-top DVD players.

The Civic comes with only a single-year's warranty on parts, but this is tempered by a five year warranty on labour.

A well earned award for Modtech, building a beast of a machine with a side of customer support in the event things go pear shaped. This unit features everything you could possibly want in a PC, and more. Best of all, it's now within reach of even the most limited budget consumers.