Meet a new player in the local motherboard market, with great features and solid performance

A simple board that struggles to justify its price

All the options you could want, although it’s pricey

A slightly bare but affordable media-centre board

A feast of features for those willing to pay

A high-end board bristling with great ideas

Plenty of connectors, but not much pizzazz

An appealingly upmarket board at a fair price

A great combination of features at an excellent price makes this our new A-List board - suitable for just about everyone.

An HDMI-equipped board ideal for small media-centre systems

A little lacking in the feature department, the P4G8X Deluxe is lean in some big areas. Short 800MHz, DDR400 or DDR333 support, its biggest selling points are its BlueMagic PCI slot, inclusion of PC-cillin antivirus software, and ASUS PC Probe for system monitoring.

One of the most interesting features of any board in this Labs is the 'AI' in the P4C800 Deluxe. The board will automatically inform you if you've plugged the wrong sort of peripheral into an audio jack, as well as informing of network cable problems.

The board's ability to increase CPU core voltage in 0.025V increments as well as adjustable FSB/DDR ratio with fixed AGP/PCI frequencies allows for maximum performance with absolute control.

Big, brash and versatile, but for top-end PCs only. Enthusiasts will love it.

Packed with extras to target some of Vista’s interesting new features, but it isn’t quite the marvel we were hoping for.

A great choice for overclockers, but the vast majority of people should buy a cheaper motherboard and better CPU.

Your cheapest MicroATX ticket into Intel's Core 2 world.

This early Nforce 570 for Intel board lacks luxuries and speed compared to Intel chipsets, but boasts a good price.

One gigabyte of RAM is enough to get most applications running smoothly, but should you buy the cheapest or the fastest?

An expensive board, but a fascintating way of getting a powerful, quiet system, especially if you're prepared to tweak.