If, in some perverted alternate reality, Watty Piper had been more interested in PCs than trains, Asus' latest piece of Republic of Gamers rolling stock would be the The Little Board That Could. The Rampage III Gene has more features per square inch of PCB than almost any other we can think of, nearly matching its stablemate, the Rampage III Extreme for extras put packing it into a micro-ATX format

Asus ups the ante again with a new X58 motherboard for the budget focused

AMD gets back its competitive edge with this i7-worrier

Only the extreme need apply, only the extremely rich can afford

Can this Republic of Gamers mobo justify its astonishingly high price tag?

Can this new motherboard from Asus snatch the H55 chipset crown?

Can a new chipset give AMD's sluggish CPUs some much-needed shizzle?

Smell something fishy? That'll be the fusion, Intel style

We find out how just how fast USB 3.0 is with the Asus 7P55D-E Pro motherboard

This P55 mobo offers DDR3 and Core i7 support for under a ton

A super speedy AM3 board for those wanting something overclocking friendly

A deluxe X58 motherboard for the overclockers

A micro-ATX mobo for that media centre you said you were going to build

Are this X58 board's features a geek too far?

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The Nvidia Nforce 680i chipset is well and truly out there now, and that's exactly what this board from Asus sports. Given the 680's legendary overclocking potential, we were intrigued to see what Asus' version could manage

Hail the conquering hero. That's the general gist from early reviews of NVIDIA's Intel chipset, the nForce 680i. But is it true? Well, not quite. In terms of stock-clocked system performance, this 680i-powered ASUS board can't quite match the best Intel boards.

Take note of this board's awesome overclocking ability. Weigh up its solid and sensible specification. And then ask yourself if you really need anything more from an Intel Core 2-supporting motherboard. Odds are, you don't.

Until NVIDIA releases its nForce 680a chipset for Athlon processors, this is probably as good as it gets for AMD Athlon motherboards. Like the Foxconn C51XEM2AA, it's NVIDIA's range- topping nForce 590 that does the chipset duties