With the appearance of large HDTV sets in the living room, the processing requirements of media centre PCs are changing. Decoding HD video requires a Micro-ATX system that can keep up with the latest hardware developments...

First a word of warning. Do not be fooled by the pair of physical 16-lane PCI-E sockets you see before you. Because this Gigabyte board is not a dual-graphics capable Crossfire companion.

The Asus P5B Deluxe is the first motherboard based on the 965 chipset to come through our labs. So far, the choice of boards that make full use of Intel's newly crowned performance champion has been slim.

Unconventional to a fault. That's the Asrock CONROEXFIRE. It's not allbad news however. Indeed, this is the kind of board you really want to like.

Gigabyte isn't shy of alliterative marketing spin and this 'S Series' motherboard serves up a succession of s's to sell its stuff: Silent-Pipe, SLI, Speed, Smart and Safe all find prominence on the box.

Clarification time. It says Crosshair, not CrossFire. So ATI fanboys can relax, this isn't an nForce chipset that supports CrossFire. It is, however, one of the most ridiculously impressive motherboards we've ever seen

Asus is clearly aiming to impress with its latest Intel motherboard. Open the box and you're presented with a remote control and a stylish antenna for the integrated wireless networking module

The nForce 590 SLI is Nvidia's flagship chipset, boasting severalfeatures that will appeal to both gamers and anyone tempted to play around with voltages and frequencies at a low level

For its first AM2 motherboard, Abit has opted for NVIDIA's nForce 570 SLI chipset. As the 'SLI' in the board's name suggests, it supports twin graphics cards from Nvidia, defaulting back to x8 operation when actually running both cards.

Hard as it may be to believe, Intel's latest desktop chipset, the 975, is gamer-orientated.Given the struggle it's had convincing gamers that Pentium pips Athlon 64 forperformance, it's an interesting tactic for Intel...

The moment Centrino was released our attention focused on the potential of the Pentium M. It was great for laptops, but as processor fans were getting louder the fantasy of a quiet yet powerful processor had us clambering to get this chip into our desktops