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.

Despite the diminutive sizes of its machines, Shuttle appears to be getting itself some serious delusions of grandeur. You can’t possibly make a small form factor gaming machine. Can you? Well, with the machines that Shuttle has been putting out recently these delusions have become reality.

Small form factors cases are cool, right? They’re compact, light and look awesome. Unfortunately building a gaming rig out of one is usually impossible, with space enough for nought but a puny pixel pusher. Not with Shuttle’s latest barebones system though; the XPC SX38P2 is just about as high end as you could wish for.

Until now, a system with triple-SLI pre-installed has been a PCFormat lab dream – theoretically possible, but never actually seen in the wild. That is, until the arrival of Advance Tec’s new machine, comprising no fewer than three beefy BFG 8800GTX graphics cards.

The PC landscape is filled with a million upgrade routes, whether it’s a question of fitting an improved graphics card or a CPU and motherboard combination. This is both the beauty and bane of being a PC gamer.

Look hard enough and you'll find a PC that's every bit as sleek as a Mac. You might not expect a company like PCNextday to deliver such a product, but this new Zoostorm desktop looks great and is a powerful package - all for just £600.

Ask any PC expert and they'll all tell you the same thing: you can't buy a decent gaming PC for £799. Then again, perhaps they haven't seen the Cyberpower Systems Gamer Infinity XT Elite. It's got the gorgeous looks you need in a silver-grey case, with retro-style analogue dials for voltage, fan speed and temperature. Turn it on and blue light shines from the case window. It's also got the hardware, in the shape of a powerful 512MB ATI HD2900XT display card, excellent Creative T6100 5.1 speakers and even an 802.11g Wi-Fi card thrown in for easy networking.

The PC Specialist Apollo Home XT isn’t one of the most stylish PCs. Still, at least it’s not beige and by avoiding spending money on a flashy case PC Specialist is able to throw in a digital TV tuner card and deliver the whole system for free. Now that sounds good to us.

MESH has a reputation for producing high-spec systems at a low price, and sure enough the Elite E6850 GT ANS stands out in several areas. It has a fast CPU in the Core 2 Duo E6850, a hefty 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive, the 18x DVD writer has LightScribe support, and there's still cash left over to thrown in a digital/analogue TV tuner card.

The 5-7401 Edge PC comes with an SLI motherboard and a power supply boasting enough juice for that second graphics card. There's no screen or other trappings of a full system, but this has enabled Zoostorm to concentrate on other elements of the rig, and produce something a little less budget-focused.

Back in this year’s damp summer, PCAnswers looked at a £900 model from PC Specialist that proved great value for money. Can this updated model that costs over £100 less win us over?

We didn't expect this PC to come with many extras - £799 just isn't enough for that - yet somehow the Zoostorm 4-3420 Advanced Premium Family PC managed to provide them anyway.

Big tower systems are great when you’re looking to expand on their functionality later, but if your PC needs are more basic then the HP Pavilion Slimline s3140.uk could be a much better choice. Its black and silver case is stylish enough to blend in anywhere, a compact 11cm wide to take up the minimum of space, and extremely quiet so using it won’t annoy anyone else.

Designing the perfect £799 PC is all about compromise and the Gladiator Titan PCA6550 is a perfect example. Its Core 2 Duo E6550 processor is quite slow, for instance, but saving money on the CPU means that Gladiator can afford to include 4GB of RAM, potentially a good trade-off.

Don't be fooled by the compact size of the case - the Dell Inspiron 530 is more powerful than it looks. In fact, it crams in more drives than any other system here: one 18x DVD writer, a DVD-ROM to make life easier when copying discs and a couple of 320GB drives for good measure.

The Chillblast system attracted attention from the moment we took it out of the box, thanks to its excellent Akasa Zen case. Its white curves, rounded buttons and perspex border around the front panel give the system a stylish look, while it opens easily to give quick access to all your hardware.

When you’re thinking about small-form factor PCs I’m willing to bet the notion of glamour barely enters your head. I’m sure like most of us you’ll associate the word with grubby shots of large-breasted, plastic ladies posing for calendars destined for the walls of garages across the land.

All you dimension-stumbling timelords will be pleased; we’ve discovered that there’s no such thing as ‘now’ in computing. Prices and specifications move so fast that they’re figuratively encrusted with dust as soon as they’ve been announced to the public.

There's little doubt that the PC currently weighing down my desk is a very fast, beautiful-looking machine; but the real sticking point with such high-performance rigs is obviously the price.

Building a games machine for the future is like attempting archery while attached to an ethanol drip. Although the target is right in front of you, every second you spend concentrating your aim sees it lurching further into the blurry recesses of ‘over there’.

CyberPower prides itself on producing beefy gaming units, but a few of its PCs are more like all-rounders. That's why we decided to review the Gamer Infinity 935 OC, which is a highly capable Core 2 Duo system - no matter what its intended purpose

This machine is beautiful. Hardly a sentence you could start most reviews with, but in this instance it's certainly true. It's in all honesty one of the best examples of system building that we've ever had

Inside the garishly painted Lian Li case, you'll find a selection of the best components money has to offer. The Intel Core 2 Q6600 is capable of some serious performance boosts thanks to the water cooling

Taken out of the context of video editing, this machine looks like little more than a cynical excuse to extract money from unsuspecting pockets using clever design.

Sony has always been led by design. It's what makes us punters pay that little bit extra, instead of going for some ugly bit of kit that does pretty much the same job. The Vaio RM1N, you'll be unsurprised to hear, doesn't break with this tried and tested formula, although it does challenge our notions of the PC