From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

I’ve become used to Nvidia and AMD rocking up with new graphics cards on a consistently quick schedule: since 2008 and beginning with the GeForce 9000-series, Nvidia has released six generations of GPUs, and AMD has replied with three of its own, starting with the Radeon HD 4000-series.

Both firms put the finishing touches on their current ranges in the spring, and the trail’s gone quiet since. Nvidia has confirmed that it won’t release any new cards before 2012, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any potential release dates for its new Radeon HD 7000-series — presumably taking extra time to further tweak and perfect the new chips.

I can understand why Nvidia and AMD aren’t in any hurry to unveil new silicon — after all, evidence suggests that few games, and fewer gamers, will make use of the levels of power available from new cards: 2007’s Crysis is still one of the most demanding games around and, outside of Battlefield 3, few forthcoming games look like they’ll tax even last year’s graphics cards — after all, most are now ported from consoles.

Take a look at the Steam Hardware Survey from July 2011. The most popular ten graphics cards are, with no exceptions, old: top of the pile is the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, and it’s followed up by venerable old warhorses like the GeForce 8800 GT, Radeon HD 4870 and even the GeForce 8600 GT. The most popular current-generation chip, the GeForce GTX 560, is 25th on the list.

To find something truly high-end, keep on travelling down the list — the GTX 570 is the 31st most popular card and is used by a whopping 0.78% of Steam’s users, and the AMD Radeon HD 6950 is favoured by just 0.68%.

That’s the biggest PC gaming platform in the world and proof that, while AMD and Nvidia have spent the fast few years trying to beat each other with benchmarks, most users haven’t taken any notice. Instead, they’re too busy playing games on cards that are older and perfectly capable.

Perhaps the big guns have realised that this pixelated arms race is virtually pointless. Almost all users either aren’t bothered or can’t afford the latest chips, and the lack of big-name PC exclusives means that even a modest card will run rings around the latest games. Enthusiasts might enjoy the yearly releases, but board partners constantly tweak, overclock and improve chips to eke more performance out of older cores — and, if they’d like to run games across several screens, there’s always CrossFireX and SLI.

It looks like we won’t see any major graphics card releases until 2012 but, after several years of frenzied, benchmark-driven battling, I’m happy to wait — and it looks like most users are, too.

The 9400M is the key that Nvidia hopes will allow it to eat away at Intel’s share. Combining the north bridge, south bridge and GPU into one chip less than half the size of Intel’s GMA X4500HD, it could be the great leap forward we’ve been waiting so long for. The integrated graphics solution that can actually run the latest games – we’d almost given up hope.

With 16 parallel processing cores, the chip is at least 70% GPU, with the rest of the essentials crammed around the edges where there’s room (as the die image clearly shows).

It offers full support for DirectX 10, PhysX, CUDA and even contains dedicated hardware for high definition video processing – Nvidia claims full-spec Blu-ray capability on a single battery charge, including all the PiP and BD Live features.

Gaming power

To demonstrate its power, Nvidia’s notebook general manager Rene Haas gave us a little side-by-side demonstration – pitting the brand new GeForce 9400M-equipped Macbook against a Centrino 2 Sony Vaio FW. Running Call of Duty 4 on both, at 1,024 x 768 and medium settings, the results were eye-opening.

The Sony exhibited all the stuttering motion and painful hangs we’ve grown accustomed to in low-end laptops, barely gettting close to 10fps throughout the level. By contrast, the MacBook ran happily at what we’d estimate to be around 25fps throughout, barely even hiccuping when the action hotted up and the effects began flying. Sure, it’s not Crysis at Very High settings, but it is a laptop with integrated graphics running a cutting-edge game at a playable framerate – and that’s something no manufacturer has yet offered us.

Photoshop

As exciting as this is, it’s in non-gaming applications that more useful advances may be appreciated. Haas fired up Photoshop CS4 on both demo laptops and opened up a whopping 3GB image ready for manipulation. As anyone who runs Photoshop on a laptop will expect, rotating and zooming the image on the Intel-equipped Sony was patchy at best: zooming was achieved in paused steps, while a 90-degree rotation left us with a progress bar for more than a minute before we saw any change.

The 9400M-equipped MacBook, on the other hand, simply flew through the image. Rotation was handled on the fly, while zooming exhibited the same smoothness we loved in Microsoft’s Deep Zoom technology when it was first demoed.

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In short, laptops with integrated GPUs can now benefit from the same CUDA-enabled technological advances as those with power-hungry discrete cards taking up the slack.

Nvidia claims the 9400M will offer five times the performance in the same power envelope as its Intel integrated rival – a bold claim indeed, but one backed up by the demos we’ve seen. We’ll be running it through our own intensive performance and battery tests in the coming weeks as laptop manufacturers unveil their first offerings with the integrated GPU.

Future potential

I spoke to Haas after the demo and asked if he thought the success of this chipset would be detrimental to Nvidia’s discrete laptop chips, but he was unequivocal. “Are we cannibalising ourselves by releasing this? I don’t think we are. Larger laptops will always have the need for discrete graphics, and there are still plenty of people who’ll prefer the power of a discrete chip in smaller laptops.”

He also threw up a few very interesting prospects on the horizon for the Geforce 9400M. CUDA-based upscaling of DVDs to 720p or more is on the agenda, potentially doing away with the need for expensive HD drives. And your low-end integrated GPU could also soon be enhancing YouTube videos – pixel interpolation of grainy streamed video is a highly parallel-processor-intensive task which lends itself well to CUDA, and Haas was hopeful it could even be with us before the end of 2008.

Whether we get there this year or next, it’s clear that Nvidia’s newest baby has the potential to shake up the integrated graphics market in a huge way. Intel has had it pretty easy for years now, despite every new advance coming with claims of genuine 3D power, and every one failing to live up to that promise. Nvidia may be struggling in the graphics card market right now, but by finally proving that an integrated chip can handle gaming it’s just diverted a whole new revenue stream towards its own coffers. Intel needs to pull its socks up.

You could look at it one of two ways. The simplest reason could be that Gainward (owned by non-exclusive card maker, Palit) simply wants to boost its profits by reaching a larger audience than it previously sold to. The other is that AMD’s current resurgence has Gainward looking upon Nvidia as less of a sure thing than before.

After all, each of Nvidia’s last few launches has seen the GeForces getting faster, but also bigger and hotter than ever before, while AMD is managing to keep up in the speed race while keeping its Radeons much more manageable, and vastly less expensive.

It’ll be interesting to see if any other manufacturers follow suit.

It’s fair to say that we were quite impressed by the Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut. A powerful 9800 GX2 graphics card, Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor and 24in Samsung screen certainly made an impression in the Labs – and it made everyone who saw it quite jealous. We all wanted one.

Except that I now have a feeling that the Juggernaut’s crown as top monster PC may be under threat. We’ve just taken delivery of the Mesh Ultimate XT9450 GTO and, well – to paraphrase the slogan of a particularly nasty meat snack – it’s a bit of an animal. As you can see, it’s housed inside a monolithic Cooler Master Cosmos, which is certainly a good start.

A quick peek at the specification reveals that there’s a few key areas where the Mesh may lose ground to the Juggernaut – or outpace it. The GPU, for instance, is a brand-new GeForce GTX 280 that we’ve reviewed today and been hugely impressed by, and there’s 4GB of 1033MHz DDR3 RAM. Both of these components are better, at least on paper, than their Juggernaut counterparts.

The processor is the same – the Q9450 – although the Juggernaut was overclocked, and the Mesh isn’t. The latest contendor, though, does include a Blu-ray drive; the Chillblast machine made do with a paltry DVD writer.

The Mesh also a 28in screen. Twenty-eight inches! Blimey.

Look out for a full review soon, and see if the Fusion Juggernaut’s title of A-listed Enthusiast PC is about to be unceremoniously stolen.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

We thought that, after taking a look at that particularly ludicrous piece of technological willy-waving, we’d seen the back of it – but it’s surprised us all by arriving back in the Labs with some brand new firmware that, we’re assured by Asus, will improve performance.

So, we’ll be back into the Labs in the next few days to provide some more results and evaluate whether Asus’ new firmware will make any difference to the card’s performance. No doubt it’ll be fun: our last foray into the world of the Trinity was certainly interesting. At first, the water-cooling didn’t work and then, when it did, we found that the pipes were the wrong way round. No wonder the three low-profile passive heatsinks were so hot that I cooked my dinner on them that evening.

At least, in theory, we know how to work the card now. Check back soon for some results as we try to eke some more performance out of the card. If you don’t hear anything from us, though, assume the worst: we’ve screwed up and the Labs has been burnt down after the card leaked and ignited our test rig. Who says that experiments aren’t fun, eh?