MOTHERBOARD

Motherboard

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

A basic barebones motherboard with a price to match, ASROCK's P4VT8 Pentium 4 motherboard may not be the most feature packed mobo around, but what it lacks in integrated components, it more than makes up for with its bargain basement price tag and practical applications.

Soltek, purveyor of all things shiny and glittery, is one of the first companies to release a motherboard based around Intel’s eagerly anticipated i865 Springdale chipset.

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.

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

AMD’s next generation of CPUs brings 45nm technology and higher clock speeds - but is that enough to compete with Intel’s latest and greatest?

Not very competitive on price, but there’s plenty of scope for performance

Legend QDI

A high-quality Core i7 motherboard with great expansion potential and premium features.

One of the really annoying things about PCs is the sheer amount of desk space they occupy. This concern led to motherboard manufacturer, Shuttle, creating the product line called XPC.

Quick-release hard disks can’t make up for design flaws.

Easy to build and maintain, but lacking overall quality.

VIA is attempting to tackle Shuttle’s stranglehold on the micro-PC market with the launch of the C3M266 motherboard coupled with a C3 processor...

ABIT's new NVIDIA nForce2 motherboard, the NF7-S, supports the AMD Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP, and also features dual 400MHz DDR memory controllers.

Looking more like a corporate slimline desktop than a barebones system, this unit features a Mini ITX motherboard while the large form allows for good component layout. Minimal overlap between the motherboard and optical drives allows for free working space even around the CPU and RAM.

A thin and versatile media PC case, with enough space for almost any piece of high end componentry.

We love hardware. As users ourselves we feel your pangs of wanting the newest, fastest rig and components. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the cost of bleeding-edge hardware at the best of times - more so with the cost of single graphics cards at times exceeding the $1000 price barrier. This is as much as some users would spend on a total system upgrade.