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?

With CrossFire performance more erratic than SLI, and NVIDIA outgunning ATI with its Shader Model 3 cards, it's hard to recommend this board.

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

Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now

A beautifully tiny computer-on-a-board that you should only consider if you have a specific use in mind

Clever corner cutting gives us an affordable, upgradeable performer.

A budget board that open the door to Crossfire graphics.

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.

The 845PE was supposed to be Intel’s mainstream desktop DDR chipset, although the e7205 (the Granite Bay), and now the 865 and 875, have stolen much of its thunder with dual-channel DDR.

Another inexpensive Soltek board that's not too heavy on the features, this KT400A board sports the bare minimum to scrape by, with six-channel audio, dual-USB 2.0 ports and ATA133 support.

Based around the SiS655 chipset, the MSI 655 MAX-FISR is a well-rounded Socket 478 motherboard.

How could a motherboard possibly cost over $1,000? The short answer is: if it has everything built in. The 8KNXP is geared towards the server market, and is the only board in this Labs with an Ultra360 SCSI controller.

Soltek offers a 865 board for a fair price with the SL086MP-L. It has some good core specifications – it hosts both Pentium 4 and Celeron processors, with support for 800MHz FSB and up to 4GB of DDR400.

SiS's 648 is one of the oldest chipsets on test here, and parallels many of the features of the Intel 845. It still has AGP 8x, 533MHz FSB and DDR333 support, though.

For an attractively low $119, the Shuttle AB60RS offers all the basics, and also includes SATA, AGP 8x, and support for up to eight USB ports.

QDI offers another board similar to the P4I865GMA Micro ATX board, except this one is full-size ATX.

The IC7 offers support for up to 4GB of dual-channel DDR, delivering bandwidth of 4.8GB/s. Decked out with every port known to humanity, it has integrated FireWire; USB 2.0; SATA; 10/100 Ethernet and six-channel audio.

A barebones Athlon mobo, the AK39N has enough functionality to set this board apart as an ideal platform for building a home PC or workstation.