The wheel of time turns and chipsets come to pass, and a year after the Z77 chipset's launch, you can pick up top-spec boards for a fraction of the price you could just a few months back.

We decided to find out if the HD 7850 in 1GB dress can compete with the pricier, bigger and badder Pitcairn Pro cards toting 2GB.

Can you really get good gaming frame rates for under £100? In the case of the MSI HD 7770, the answer is an affirmative yes.

MSI's first Z77 effort doesn't do a lot wrong, but it's not the best showcase of Intel's brand new chipset.

Is it a case of incremental updates all along the line, or has MSI done enough to put this X79-based board in another class?

Can a one touch overclock button make up for a lack of features on this 990FX motherboard?

Does this budget AMD 970 chipset motherboard get the fundamentals right?

A typical high-end MSI board that's packed with features

A wee microATX board for the Llano generation

Military-grade graphics cards. It's what your granddad fought for…

A solid mid-range GPU that offers good performance in SLI

Harder, better, faster, stronger. Has the GTX 580 just graduated?

MSI has thrown absolutely everything at its latest Big Bang Marshal P67 motherboard, and it all seems to have stuck. This is quite simply the most fully featured Sandy Bridge P67 motherboard around.

It's good to see that MSI has thought a bit about where the board might end up, hence the higher quality power components. In this case, they're used to prevent the board falling over in a hot environment rather than providing stability while the CPU is being tortured through overclocking.

So really there's no compelling reason to pick this card up over a standard HD 6950. It's around £50 more expensive, and you'll still be able to hit the same overclock, admittedly with a little more heat, as this Twin FrozR II version.

As with every generation of cards, the flagship sets sail before the hanky-waving crowds, and the slimmed down versions with slightly less capable GPUs follow in their wake. The GTX 470 came hot on the heels of the GTX 480, and with only marginally reduced architecture.

A solid board at a sensible price, but lacking the latest storage interfaces

With the launch of a whole new chipset, you can bet your last kidney that there'll be a slew of new motherboards hitting the scene from pretty much everyone who's ever laid capacitors on PCB.

Cheap but very, very cheerful

MSI's motherboard has astronomical power

It's Intel's turn to get the cross vendor graphics love with this Fuzion mobo from MSI

Enabling the mainstream to mix ATI and Nvidia in multi-GPU setups

This microATX board has all the features and performance you'll ever need in real terms

MSI is on to a winner with this SATA 6Gbps and USB3 equipped motherboard

A DX11 graphics card for gamers on a budget