An HD cinema nettop in a really tiny box

The latest release of Apple's all-in-one computer enjoys several key improvements

Sub £1,000 desktop PC with Windows 7 pre-installed, so where's it going wrong?

Chris Jenkins downsizes his media PC

Yoyotech's bid to build the ultimate media centre PC for satellite and terrestrial TV recording is impressive with the right software

This media centre PC is cute, but not perfectly formed

More GPUs than you can shake an SLI connector at, but is it worth it?

Has the touchscreen nettop finally come of age?

A low-cost PC on sale in Aldi - sadly, it's not all it's cracked up to be

The Vortex of the latest Core i7 processors

Dell's XPS 730X stands for Xtremely Pricey System

What's in the box?

Atom returns with an extra core, and it's coming for your media box

Exclusive The £4,000 beast you see here was configured with one purpose in mind: to break the world record in the benchmark that many consider to be the de facto metric of overall CPU performance, SPEC CPU2006. It's absolutely phenomenal...

Good things come in small packages, well, the Eee PC certainly proved that to be true. And judging by the number of Eee PC clones out there today, it's obvious that small computers are big business now.

My first ever computer was a Commodore. A beautiful machine, all chunky plastic keys and shades of beige and grey called the Vic-20. I was about five- or six-years-old and I was hooked.

The hardy iMac, which was first announced to the world a decade ago this summer, is responsible for a significant chunk of Apple’s success. Back in 1998, you’ll remember that it was the brightly coloured, translucent iMac that reaffirmed Apple’s reputation as a hot design house and groundbreaking computer-maker in one.

Performance rigs aren’t having an easy time of it. Budget systems can be picked up for as little as £500 yet can still throw around most games with wanton abandon (at least at lower settings and resolutions). Meanwhile, the graphics market is bereft of high-end cards that warrant spending silly money. CyberPower has an answer to this particularly tricky problem that comes in the form of lots of glowing piping and clock speeds.

The XTD has given me a conundrum: it’s a well specced, well-made rig that costs about the same as if you’d bought all the individual bits yourself and spent an age setting it all up. And trying to figure out which component was the offending item stopping the damn thing posting… Of course, I have long been a proponent of building your own PC when it comes to starting from scratch, but rigs like this are starting to make me question my own DIY ethos.

When quad-core hits the mainstream you know that it’s a good time to buy. Like the current housing market, prices are falling fast. The difference is, of course, that you won’t have trouble financing a purchase like the Apollo V930: £600 will get you a quad-core PC, widescreen monitor and peripherals.

Owning a home computer in the 80s usually meant owning a Commodore. The company was known for producing some of the most popular gaming machines during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras: the VIC-20, C64 and Amiga

Philips second-generation media centre PC ticks most of the boxes when it comes to living room system integration. Unlike its name, the Philips LRPC7500 Streamium Freevents is wonderfully small, measuring a mere 45mm high.

Computer Planet is a custom builder with a good pedigree, but when challenged with a £500 budget, we were surprised what we ended up with – and not in a good way

Media centres and living room PCs are set to become one of the rising technologies of the next twelve months, and Sony is hoping that its brand new VAIO TP2 media PC will set the standard for the rest of the competition. Its timing couldn't be better either, because in 2008 more people than ever are waking up to the dream of building a digital home.

Two months ago, we experienced a miracle in the PCFormat bunker, as if God himself had let a PC descend from the heavens like a dual-core Angel Gabriel. It was the CyberPower Infinty 850, a sub-£550 gaming rig that would run Crysis out of the box. Amen. Would Cyberpower be able to pull off such a marvel again? In a word, no.