Gigabyte - G41MT-ES2L review

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The Gigabyte G41MT-ES2L is one of the cheapest motherboards on the market and sells for less than £40 including VAT. At that price you don't get much in the way of the latest technology, and all of the functions are supplied by the Intel G41 chipset, without extra hardware to add new features such as USB 3.0.

This means that we have to take a step back from the current crop of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs to LGA775. That'll cost you about £60 for a Pentium dual core or £100 for a Core 2 Duo. It seems unlikely that anyone will want to ally a £200 or £300 Core 2 Quad with this budget motherboard.

The two memory slots support up to 4GB of 1,333MHz DDR3, which is fine for the mainstream majority who use a 32-bit Operating System and just about adequate if you plan on a 64-bit upgrade, where 4GB of RAM is considered a minimum.

Asus - Crosshair IV Formula review

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Republic Of Gamers motherboards sit at the top of the Asus product tree, and this was amply demonstrated by the recent IT Reviews coverage of the ROG Rampage III Extreme Core i7 that weighs in at a hefty £330.

It takes a few moments to figure out exactly where the Crosshair IV Formula fits into the ROG family as the model codes and chipsets are constantly evolving. Rampage III motherboards use an Intel X58 chipset to support LGA1366 Core i7, Maximus III uses P55 chipset for LGA1156 Core i5/i7 and Crosshair IV has the latest AMD 890FX + SB850 chipset for Socket AM3 CPUs.

The final part of the model names defines the list of features so a Formula is a regular ATX board with ‘standard' ROG features for overclocking and support for multiple graphics cards. A Gene model is a Micro-ATX design that is aimed at LAN gamers who fancy a portable PC, while Extreme models come with every last feature that the Asus engineers can muster. We understand that Asus has a Crosshair IV Extreme in the works that uses a Lucid chip to add SLI support alongside the CrossFireX support that is provided by the 890FX chipset.

ASRock - X58 Extreme3 review

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Over the past 18 months we've seen a long procession of Intel X58 motherboards pass across our test bench. In many respects the ASRock X58 Extreme3 looks quite familiar, as we have seen most of the features before and the layout follows a predictable form. There are six DDR3 memory slots connected to the integrated triple channel memory controller that supports up to 24GB of DDR3-2000 RAM.

Moving down the board there are three graphics slots that support CrossFireX and SLI. The two blue slots each get a full 16 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 while the long white PCI Express slot looks as though it should support a third graphics card but only gets four lanes of slower PCI Express. If you fancy running SLI with a third nVidia card for PhysX then ASRock has the hardware for you. In addition to the graphics slots there are two PCI slots and a PCI Express x1 slot.