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.

Ordinarily, yes – but Shuttle doesn’t like to use the big tower cases that have room for all that. Instead, the SX58H7 Pro has a specification we never thought we’d see in a small-form-factor chassis.

For starters, the interior is dominated by an AMD Radeon HD 6950 – the third-fastest card in AMD’s current range, and one that requires a dual-slot cooler to keep the core chilled.

You’d think that wouldn’t leave much room for other components, but we’re struggling to find an area where Shuttle hasn’t gone way beyond the call of duty. The impossibly small CPU heatsink covers an Intel Core i7-950 processor, and storage is provided by both a 60GB Corsair Force SSD and a 1TB hard disk. There’s Blu-ray too and, more impressively, a massive 12GB of RAM.

As usual, Shuttle has done a stellar job cramming it all in, and there’s even a little bit of upgrade room, with a spare DIMM socket and empty SATA port ready for additional memory and storage. USB 3 and SATA/600 are also both included.

That’s not to say we don’t have concerns. When I announced what was inside, the entire office recoiled for fear of the heat it’ll surely belch out into a confined space. There’s little in the way of through-flow: one 80mm fan on the heatsink attached to the back of the machine, a single fan on the graphics card and just two small grilles down either side where air can be drawn into the case.

There’s the other major caveat, too: price.  Shuttle hasn’t let us know how much this particular build of the SX58H7 Pro will cost, but the barebones unit – without processor, graphics card, memory, storage or any other components – is slated to cost £532.

Nevertheless, we’re mightily impressed, so check back next week for the full review. In the meantime, we’re going to take bets on just how hot the SX58H7 Pro will get during our benchmarks and, just as importantly, how much it’ll cost. Got a guess? Let us know in the comments.

Several other details can be surmised by looking at these pictures closely, though. It’s brimming with display outputs — one DVI-I port alongside four mini-DisplayPort outputs — and the mammoth cooler extends down the length of the huge PCB and is topped off by a fan in the middle of card.

Of course, the HD 6990 might need that amount of cooling, seeing as it’s rumoured to include two of the firm’s latest GPUs.

That’s all the information we’re allowed to reveal for now, though, so you’ll have to check back soon when the embargo lifts for our full review. In the meantime, we’ll see if we can find a case and power supply that will accommodate this gigantic monster.

To read our full review of the HD 6990, and find out if this £550 card is worth the cash, click here.

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.

This is the ATI Radeon HD 4870, rumoured before its release to be one of the fastest cards around, and it has just landed in our labs, only one week after it was announced.

It’s benchmarking downstairs in our labs as we speak – hence the odd angle in the image above – but we can already tell you that it looks to be incredible value for money.

It’s not as fast as Nvidia’s GTX 280, as we hoped it might be earlier this month, but it looks to be matching the speed of the GTX 260 – while almost chopping its price in half.

We’ll have full benchmark results and a review on the way soon, so keep an eye out on the site.

The likes of David Bayon and Mike Jennings can keep their PS3s and their GTA IVs. Me, I’m much more excited about tomorrow’s UK release of Super Smash Bros Brawl (SSBB to its friends).

Excited — but also apprehensive, because, let’s face it, Nintendo doesn’t exactly have a great record on stock availability. My experience of actually using the Wii has been entirely positive; but buying it, and then buying games and accessories for it, has involved a surprising amount of anxiously standing in queues at stupid times of the morning. Because if you miss the first shipment of games/controllers/consoles, you may not have another chance to buy the thing you want for weeks or even months.

(Yes, I know I should pre-order. I tried that with the Wii console itself and all I got was an email the day before launch saying they didn’t have enough stock. Shut up.)

It’s frustrating, but I can sort of understand why it happens. Obviously it takes time and money to manufacture these things, and if you’re manufacturing them in advance of a launch it also costs money to store them until the big day. So, logically, it makes sense to produce as few copies as you can get away with for launch – just the minimum needed to stir up demand for subsequent shipments. These can then be supplied more cheaply, because they don’t need to be stored.

(It’s also risky to produce millions of units before you have a realistic indication of demand – a lesson nicely illustrated back in the eighties.)

All of which reminds me, in a roundabout way, of the recent arrival of the new ATI Radeon HD 4000 series. You may have noticed the slightly unorthodox two-stage launch, which saw us publish a more or less full review of the HD 4850 – minus technical details – last week, followed by yesterday’s report on the internals. I have to admit, it surprised me.

There’s no official word on why things happened this way, but hey, speculation is free. Naturally, the new cards needed to be manufactured ahead of the launch. And while Nintendo can afford to be conservative with its launches, each of AMD’s manufacturing partners will have wanted to have plenty of stock available on day one. Let’s be honest, if there are no Brand X HD 4870s to be had, most consumers will just buy a Brand Y card instead. It’s the same GPU, after all.

So, this time last week, there were probably hundreds of thousands of brand new Radeon graphics cards sitting around in manufacturer and retailer warehouses all across the world, gathering dust and waiting for launch day. Under the circumstances, who’d be surprised if one or two cards fell into the hands of well-connected enthusiasts, eager to try out the new card and share their experiences on the internet…?

In that context, AMD’s response makes sense. It could hardly put the genie back in the bottle, but equally it couldn’t, at such short notice, bring the launch forward – at least, not without screwing up a lot of people’s plans, including those of its manufacturing partners. So in the end its managers took the view that, if the card was going to be previewed on the web, it should be previewed by people who were able to do it properly. (And by this I mean no disrespect to non-journalists, who are by all accounts lovely people. But even die-hard PC enthusiasts probably aren’t in a position to do the kind of extensive head-to-head testing we perform in our labs.)

So in the end, a selection of reputable reviewers (preen, preen) were invited to publish previews ahead of the official launch, while the technical specs, and full availability, were held back until yesterday.

So, how did this relate to my Wii game again? Well, I have to admit, it’s not a perfect analogy. There’s no question of a stock shortage for the Radeon HD 4850. And, sad to say, I haven’t found a retailer naughtily selling Super Smash Bros Brawl ahead of its launch.

But still, it’s a story that gives me hope. Because it reminds me that items don’t just miraculously spring into being at midnight on launch day. Like the HD 4850 last week, SSBB is officially no more than a promise for the future — yet, even as I type this, there are doubtless thousands of very real copies sitting in crates in back rooms up and down Oxford Street. It’s in the wings right now, ready and waiting for its cue to step out of the shadows and onto the shelves.

And I know it doesn’t make any sense; but somehow it’s a good feeling to know that SSBB has, in some sense, already landed. It gives me a little more confidence that, when tomorrow comes, and I’m standing in that queue… perhaps – just perhaps – there’ll be a copy with my name on it.

Sincerely yours, Pikachu.

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?