AMD doesn't make the fastest PC processors on planet Earth. We can all agree on that. But in terms of bang for your British buck, the world's second-string CPU maker still has plenty to offer. Put simply, you get a lot for your money if you go with an AMD platform. Take this Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H microATX motherboard. It's based on AMD's latest 880G integrated chipset and also sports the SB850 southbridge chip.

ECS may not be as well known as some of its rivals, but it does seem to come out with some interesting boards, especially its Black Extreme series for the enthusiasts. And the latest addition to this line is no exception.

With no less than five temperature probes and five fan controllers the NZXT Sentry LXE sets itself up to be the environmental control centre for your PC.

Foxconn is back in the motherboard market, and it's good timing what with Intel's Sandy Bridge launch, so here's its high-end board, the originally-named P67A-S.

Riffing on the 'small, but perfectly formed' design ethos, Asus P8P67M-Pro is packing a lot into its teeny, tiny footprint.

The GTX 460 was an awesome card when it first tipped up, and the GTX 560 Ti is following in those footsteps. What's changed though is that those footsteps are far more well trod than they were when the GTX 460 came out.

In the new Vengeance series of dual and triple channel DDR3 from Corsair though that's not necessarily a bad thing. This twin-module kit offers a massive 8GB of speedy system memory, and for just over a ton that's really not bad.

Seemingly from out of nowhere, here comes AMD heartthrob, Sapphire, with a top-end Intel motherboard, the Pure Black X58.

What kind of processor performance can you get for this cheap a price?

It's fashionable among the technologistas to grumble about the quality and performance of solid-state drive controller chipsets. But controllers aren't the only problem with SSD performance; increasingly, storage interfaces are creating a bottleneck. Enter the OCZ IBIS HSDL 240GB, an ultra-high performance SSD designed to sidestep performance issues related to the SATA I/O interface.

Another passively cooled graphics card but one that doesn't break the bank

A passively cooled HD 5770 which aims to keep your PC running quiet

This is the fastest USB drive we have ever tested - as long as you have USB 3.0 support

Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors are stupidly, impossibly, hilariously quick. By some metrics, they're the most impressive new CPUs in memory. However, one of the downsides is the requirement for a new motherboard. Still, if you're going to make the migration to a new Sandy Bridge system, why not consider a small-form-factor board, such as the Foxconn H67S?

With the launch of a whole new chipset, you can bet your last kidney that there'll be a slew of new motherboards hitting the scene from pretty much everyone who's ever laid capacitors on PCB.

When it comes to new PC components, odes to awesomeness are often overwrought. But take it from us, Intel's new Sandy Bridge desktop processors proved worthy of our finest prose. The Intel Core i5-2500K and Intel Core i7-2600K chips are preposterously quick. Of course, to get the best out of them what you need is a damn fine motherboard. For example, the Asus Maximus IV Extreme RoG.

Ready or not, here they come. Intel is rolling out a thoroughly overhauled range of PC processors based on its new Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. Our first taste of the new chips comes in the form of the Intel Core i5-2500K and Intel Core i7-2600K desktop CPUs.

Ready or not, here they come. Intel is rolling out a thoroughly overhauled range of PC processors based on its new Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. Our first taste of the new chips comes in the form of the Intel Core i5 2500K and Intel Core i7 2600K desktop CPUs.

Is this cheaper SSD still worth the price premium?

Is it worth using a simple motherboard for high-end processors?

A terabyte of laptop storage for under £100? Are you serious?

In performance terms the Radeon HD 6950 is a rather impressive beast. Considering it's around £80 cheaper than the Radeon HD 6970, and you're only losing a couple of frames per second on most of the benchmarks, that makes it doubly so.

Finally they've arrived; the much-anticipated Cayman GPU-powered HD 6900 series cards from AMD. And right here we've got the very top-end of AMD's latest single-GPU cards, the AMD Radeon HD 6970.

Can 3D outputs and a few extra megahertz improve the 6870?

Can an overclock make this card more desirable?