Lab

£999 PCs

The personal computer market is dominated by Far Eastern factories, but that doesn't mean you can't buy home-grown products. There are plenty of computer companies here in the UK, and although they largely build systems from parts manufactured abroad, there's still something to be said for supporting local employers. In practical terms, a PC built here may be more in keeping with what British buyers want, and you never know, the environment might even benefit from less of its bulk having been shipped halfway around the world.

All the models on test cost £999, though not all companies offer free delivery, so you may have to pay a few pounds on top. This has always been a key price point for PCs, and as technology moves on, your £999 inevitably buys you something even better every year. It's easy to rave about exactly how much a grand gets you these days, but some of this month's entrants really did surprise us. For example, all six PCs came with 500GB hard disks, powerful graphics cards that can play modern games at maximum detail settings, and luxurious 22-inch widescreen TFT monitors. The extra screen space is great for work, especially in creative applications where you need one eye on what you're editing and the other on piles of palettes, and it also makes games feel that little bit more realistic by stretching out the display to fill your peripheral vision. That's before you even contemplate the joys of telly-sized playback from DVDs and video downloads.

If gaming is your thing, two of these PCs even have a dual graphics card setup, one using nVidia's SLI system and the other ATi's CrossFire. Both use recently released cards. All the PCs support DirectX 10, so you'll be able to enjoy the next generation of games once they're released. The dawn of games that use DirectX 10 has come to seem like a mythical prophecy, but it really is getting nearer, with the likes of Crysis and HellGate: London slated for release around November. Rumour has it that the former will be playable at maximum settings on a single GeForce 8800 graphics card, meaning your £999 PC could shame almost any gaming system in existence up to now. Even if you don't care about playing games, there's a PC to suit here, with two vendors using all their powers of geekery to make already powerful dual-core processors run even faster than they should (we have more to say about their overclocking schemes in the reviews).

Another maker has even managed to fit a quad-core processor into the budget, helping to ensure the system is always responsive, no matter how many applications you run concurrently, and - if you use software that can talk to all four processing cores simultaneously, as the latest versions of the major applications can - will deliver super-fast performance for tasks like video encoding. This PC also comes with 4GB of RAM, though we'll discuss in the review why this may not be quite such a good thing as it sounds.

With so much performance on offer, our testing had to be as rigorous and thorough as ever. Naturally, we ran our standard benchmarks on all the PCs to test their basic speed, but we also ran a series of tests on every other part of the system. Some came with fancy sound cards and surround sound speakers, for example, so we tested audio quality too. As important as it is to get a good PC, it's just as important to get a good screen with it. A quality monitor should last at least five years, while the computer it came with will generally be outdated in two or three. Longevity aside, whenever you're using the computer you'll be looking at the screen, so it makes the difference between getting a PC you enjoy using every day and one that you won't want to go near unless you really have to. We ran a series of tests on the displays - from an engineer's tool called DisplayMate through to watching a film, playing a game, and of course a good bit of poking and prodding - to get a definitive understanding of what was good and what wasn't. Now at last the results are in, and you can read on to find out which of these PCs is the best of British.