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.

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.

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.

Albatron's offering to the 865P family is bursting at the seams with features. SATA and IDE RAID, eight-channel audio, FireWire, dual-channel DDR, USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet.

The S2662AN differs from most of the mobos in this Labs in that it is designed as a workstation-class board.

One of only three ABIT boards in our roundup supporting ATA133, the SR7-8X lacks SATA and features only two-channel audio.

Intel's 865G chipset (codenamed Springdale), is almost identical to the 875 (Canterwood), and is designed to support the new Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading as well as the 800MHz frontside bus (FSB). It also includes 8x AGP, USB 2.0 and Serial ATA support.

The BH7 sports plenty of connectivity options, with two S/PDIF ports for optical audio; six-channel audio, SATA and side-mounted IDE ports.

Built with convenience in mind, this board features six board-mounted USB 2.0 ports, and two more on a rear panel.