The MSI P4M890 is a MicroATX motherboard, based around a fairly basic VIA P4M890 chipset, which makes it a perfectly capable board for lower end PCs -- which could potentially be office boxes, media centres or secondary PCs.

is not designed as a high end, performance motherboard -- as its $110 price tag and our test results show. Nonetheless, it still boasts two SATA ports as well as two IDE ports for legacy drives. There’s also a RAID controller, integrated video and gigabit ethernet. There are 4 USB ports at the back of the motherboard, along with two USB headers on the motherboard itself, which can take the total to eight if the case you’re planning on using has provisions for the headers, as no expansion brackets are included with the motherboard. In fact, all that’s included in the box is a single SATA cable, an IDE cable, a molex to SATA power converter and a connector backplane.

There are no options in the BIOS to ramp the RAM speed above 533 MHz, and between this and the performance of the Via chipset itself, we saw the MSI P4M890M take a performance hit of about 12 % across our benchmark suite. Under SuperPi, the MSI board took 2 minutes and 22 seconds to calculate Pi to four million decimal places -- 35 seconds slower than the same X6800 in a motherboard armed with a P965 chipset. Looking at this another way shows the performance of our X6800 lowered to the same level as an AMD FX-62.

On the surface, there are a surprising number of overclocking options included. RAM voltages can be adjusted from 1.8 to 2.4 volts, and the FSB can be theoretically pushed from 200 to 500 MHz. We dropped in our Core2 Duo X6800 and wound up the FSB, where we hit a wall just below the 298MHz mark, which gave us an extra 350 MHz on the CPU. After pulling the CPU multiplier back from 11X to 6X we were able to increase FSB to 303 MHz, at which point the motherboard complained, gave up and reset itself to the defaults.

The onboard VIA Unichrome Pro graphics chip powers a single VGA port. It would have been a nice touch for more display options (such as DVI, HDMI or even S-Video) to be made available through a riser card. Sadly this is lacking, restricting its use as a fully featured out-of-the-box media centre board. If you are planning to use the board as the base for a media centre PC, you’ll probably need to use a separate graphics card to provide a more TV friendly output.

There’s a single PCI-e 16x slot provided for this, however if you use a dual slot graphics card you will cover the only PCI-e 1x slot available, leaving you with two PCI slots for expansion.

Under the current BIOS revision, Kentsfield processors are not supported, nor are Conroe processors with an FSB of 1333MHz. This may change in time, however if you are looking at putting together a system on the cheap, this perfectly adequate -- but by no means stellar -- motherboard should suit most lower end applications very well, and still provide an upgrade path if you install a low end chip to begin with. And of course, it’s so bloody cheap to begin with. Bargain.