The move to a new platform brings credible new challengers to Intel’s Core 2 processors

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?

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

This motherboard is a promising appetiser – although the real meal is yet to come.

A decent board, but the Hybrid SLI feature doesn’t justify the high asking price

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

An uninspiring board with no strong selling point

A capable little package at an attractive price

A slightly bare but affordable media-centre board

Cheap, but there’s not much here to cheer about

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

Like the KT4 Ultra, the ASUS A7V8X is an Athlon XP board that uses the VIA KT400 chipset. It packs in a truckload of extras, such as Serial ATA, FireWire, Gigabit LAN, AGP 8X and even RAID.

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.