Intel has a nasty habit of killing off relatively new chipsets and leaving buyers in the lurch. So it was with the X48 chipset, which appeared within months of the X38.

Some of NVIDIA’s recent mobo chipsets haven’t been that clever. The nForce 780i is a case in point. Despite the 7 Series moniker, it was little more than a rehash of the 680i chipset with PCI Express 2.0 unconvincingly glued on.

The Intel P35 chipset’s status as the weapon of choice for overclocking slaps on it perilously lofty expectations. It’s easy to forget that it’s a mainstream chipset. The same logic applies to MSI’s P35 Platinum board.

It’s a relief to see a new AMD product that’s bang on target. We speak, of course, of the 780G chipset. It really is the killer home cinema solution that we’ve been waiting for.

We're not usually convinced by boards which support two memory types, like this Foxconn effort. But coming in at the top of our benchmarks is quite an achievement - proving that that the P35 remains competitive against its bigger brother.

The sad truth is that there's really no need to spend nearly £200 on a motherboard. Especially when the RAM to drive it is going to be double that. But bless MSI for trying all the same.

The X38 chip commands the price premium here, but Asus has tried to soften the blow by loading this board with more extras than Ben Hur. Of course, since this is a DDR3 board, it's going to be tough to make any kind of value judgement out of it, but at least it shows willing.

They mean the god of war, not the chocolate bar, obviously. That’d be silly. And this is not a silly board at all. It’s definitely pitched at the fiddler, with a giant heatsink and fan on the northbridge, and controls for boot, reset and CMOS clearly present as micro-switches on the board itself – very handy indeed.

If we were less careful, this budget offering from Gigabyte might have slipped through the net. The slim board doesn't support multiple GPUs and only has a four-pin power connection for the CPU and a relatively small northbridge heatsink - which should mean it's not so hot for overclocking, if you'll pardon the pun.

The board itself is a standard NFORCE 680i job. That means it's stable and overclocks well, but runs hot compared to the latest Intel boards at similar speed. It does have an LED read-out for troubleshooting, though, which few of the P35 boards have.

Once again Asrock has done some of us a favour and taken last year's chipset and made it compatible with this year's technology.

Here it is, then, the real deal. Without a quad core Phenom to test it with, it's a little hard to draw any conclusions about Spider, but Gigabyte's board is good value for money nonetheless.

There are two versions of AMD's latest chipset in this test - the 790X and the slightly higher specced 790FX. The only real difference is that the FX has more options for overclockers, as this features a slightly crippled version of Overdrive.

One of the very few X38 boards to feature solely DDR2 slots, Asus' Maximus is otherwise fully tricked out in the standards of its Republic of Gamers brand.

The Palit N78S can't even handle a moderately demanding title like Call of Duty4 at 800x600 with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. And that's with the texture detail crushed into a blurry mush. So much for the sparkly newness of the 8200m's DX10 feature set. It's of interest only on paper.

Before this motherboard landed with a resolute thud in our labs, we had never heard of J&W, let alone knew it was a manufacturer of motherboards. However, with the promise of CrossFire support at a bargain price, we saw it our duty to see if it was worth considering.

It's all about the platform. That's the most important single message AMD wants you to grasp regarding the simultaneous launch of its new graphics cards, CPUs and the new 790 FX motherboard chipset

As a motherboard that actually supports DDR3, the P35 Diamond is something of an oddity anyway. But its elaborate cooler is the reason you'll be scratching your head as you get it out of the box, rather than the memory standard

Asus produces an incredible number of motherboards, catering for just about every market, and its consistent appearance in machines we review shows that they know what they're doing.

Abit has several motherboards based on the P35 chipset, with the 'Pro' model here being the most expensive and the one gathering most interest thanks to its impressive overclocking potential.

There's a bit of confusion surrounding this. Have ASUS made PCFormat a bespoke motherboard? It seems tailor-made for our benchmark marathons. Hardwired buttons for power and reset are on the board, so we don't have to fit it inside a case to test chips, or resort to poking the power switch pins with a screwdriver.

Asus doesn't make memory; it does makes a lot of components, but memory isn't one of them. This, then, is rebranded memory from Qimonda, which has been given the Asus lick of paint in order to help Asus shift its top-end P5K3 Deluxe motherboard

When we first took a peek at this board, we came away extremely impressed. With an awesome overclocking ability that's second only to Intel's new P35 chipset, it's arguable whether you need any more headroom from your motherboard at all

Conspicuous bargain or false economy? Just what to make of Asrock's slightly zany LGA775 socket motherboard? For starters, it's based on Intel's 945 chipset which in theory does not support the Core 2 family of CPUs

AMD's Athlon chip sure makes life easy. By integrating many functions into the CPU die, there's a lot less to muck up. Which perhaps explains why this socket-AM2 board delivers such convincing performance.