The response to our request for entries into our first Expert labs was disappointing. To be fair we couldn't have picked a worse time to request machines, ie you couldn't find a Pentium III processor for love nor money, and we were working to pretty tight deadlines. We were hampered even more with computers from two manufacturers giving us problems that they couldn't resolve under our deadlines so they had to be removed. Those companies will, of course, remain nameless in the interest of professionalism and goodwill, although we'll probably hold it against them in the future.

When doing our testing we used the full versions of 3D Mark 2000 Pro, Winstone and Winbench 99 1.1. We also ran BAPco 2000 to test overall system stability and to give our final performance benchmark, referencing the Winstone scores to make sure there were no mistakes. Well, when I say NO mistakes, what I actually mean is......