The usual Bose feel-good glow and (mostly) great sound too �€" but at a price

In classic Bose style, the SoundDock Portable seems at first to be awfully expensive for what it is. There's no facility to stream video files from your iPod (in fact, extra features extend no further than a 3.5mm auxiliary input) and it's unassuming to g...

Expensive but extraordinary. If God watches the telly, he does it on one of these

So behold Pioneer's flagship 50in plasma, the PDP-LX508D. It builds on the ability of the PDP-508XD in three ways: it adds a new colour filter, aimed at improving red hues, it ups its contrast ratio from 16,000:1 to an almighty 20,000:1, and it packs in o...

A Blu-ray drive is just about the only justification for the Sony's high price; it's poor value overall.

The 17in LCD isn't as reflective as others, and is exceptionally bright and sharp. It has the same resolution as the Dell �€" 1920 x 1200 �€" in order to display Blu-ray movies at their native resolution

An affordable way to get excellent frame rates.

Still, for $449, XFX's Alpha Dog card gave a remarkable performance in our benchmarks, partly assisted by XFX increasing the core and RAM clocks to 670MHz and 1.95GHz respectively. It aced our DirectX 9 Call of Duty 2 benchmark: even at 1600 x 1200, the 8...

A competent card with older games, but it can't handle the new generation of games.

Our first test confirmed our doubts: Call of Duty 2 is an old DirectX 9 game and the 3870's average frame rate of 35fps at high detail settings fell far short of the speeds we've come to expect from Nvidia

Good performance and value, plus plenty of media-centre practicality in this silent graphics card

Inevitably, the 2600 XT became very warm to the touch while running our 3D benchmarks. This didn't lead to any stability issues in our testing, but it will inevitably push up the temperature of a closed desktop PC, and you're likely to need some reasonabl...

A useful card for more relaxed gaming, and a quiet cooler to boot.

The 2600 Pro has good media-centre credentials, too. Both of its DVI ports are HDCP-enabled, and the card includes an integrated 5.1 HD audio controller with AC3 support, so you can run audio over an HDMI cable via its special DVI-to-HDMI converter. As we...

It's the best-value graphics card for those playing games at 1280 x 1024.

issue of PC Authority

Nvidia's first HDMI graphics card, complete with HDCP compatibility and decent performance.

The package comes with an HDMI-to-DVI converter. It sports an optical S/PDIF-in port and cable for plugging externally into your soundcard. However, there's also an internal coaxial S/PDIF cable for connecting internally (though the header on our test sam...

The 512MB makes little difference but the heatsink is quieter than XFX's.

As with other 7900 GS cards this has seven vertex shaders and 20 pixel shaders. It runs at the reference settings of 450MHz core clock and 660MHz memory. The 512MB of memory should only make a difference when playing games which require this much for text...