The most surprising things about this group are the specifications and performance of the machines tested. It's easy to believe from some glossy PC brochures that you can get little more than an office workstation for £500 plus VAT.

But looking at the PCs provided by these suppliers, most of whom sell mainly over the Internet to keep their costs low, you get a much better deal, and these PCs can handle most everyday tasks in the home or small office.

You still need to shop around for the best deal, though, as there's quite a bit of variation between the highest and lowest value systems reviewed here. At the lower end, we're looking at a system with a single CD/DVD drive, a graphics chips sharing memory with the main processor and a pair of speakers that look like an afterthought.

Moving up the ladder, even at this comparatively frugal price point, you can get one of the fastest desktop chips currently available, in the form of the Athlon 64 3200. This processor, supplied with plenty of memory, a good sized hard drive and a DVD rewriter, forms the basis of the Carrera system and when you look at the performance results, you can see how effective this combination is. The Vision 64 ITR gets the award for performance in this group.

At the top end we have a system with a DVD rewriter and accompanying DVD reader, fast processor, heaps of memory, large hard drive, decent graphics card and monitor and a pretty effective sound system. In case you hadn't already guessed, this is the Net Elite 499 from NetHighStreet. If we were looking at buying a PC for under £500, we'd be very tempted by this well-balanced design, though we'd still try to replace the speakers at an early date.