The Abit IP35-E costs slightly more than our recommended Gigabyte GM-MA78GM-S2H, but sadly it isn’t a comparable proposition. There’s nothing actually wrong with it, but while the Gigabyte goes beyond what we’d expect from a $100 motherboard, the IP35-E comes across as rather bog standard.

A case in point is the Abit’s backplate, which is one of the sparsest we’ve seen. Aside from audio connectors, it offers just four USB sockets, two PS/2 connectors and a single ethernet port. Internal connectors aren’t any more generous: one PCI Express 16x slot, four SATA connectors and a single IDE port. There’s no RAID controller, either.

On the upside, the IP35-E’s idle power consumption was one of this month’s lowest at 99W. And the BIOS is just as easy to use as it is on Abit’s more expensive IX38 QuadGT. We were able to tweak and overclock CPU, PCI and DRAM settings to our hearts’ content, although the FSB and RAM clock won’t exceed the standard frequencies of 1333MHz and 800MHz respectively.

While the feature set may be rather minimal, nothing really fundamental has been missed out. The IP35-E does, after all, have built-in sound and networking, three PCI slots and a RAM capacity of up to 8GB in four sockets – and it supports the latest LGA 775 processors, of course.

The IP35-E could form the basis of a perfectly capable PC. Indeed, if it were a little cheaper, it would be a great demonstration of smart cost-cutting, retaining every necessary feature while ditching the luxuries. Above the $100 mark, though, we expect a little more than bare functionality, and other boards in this Price range offer greater flexibility.