The Extreme 4 makes good use of the latest Intel chipset at a very good price point

A wee microATX board for the Llano generation

The desktop Llano board in the lead at the moment

Getting on board the Bulldozer-ready motherboard bandwagon before it even starts, but is it too premature?

The 990FX chipset shows off its features while Bulldozer's stuck in traffic

A tiny motherboard with some serious ambition

An affordable Intel Z68 chipset motherboard has landed

Astoundingly, while other manufacturers have yet to get one out the door, there are 12 different variations on the theme from Gigabyte already, including this, the Z68X-UD3H-B3.

AMD's long-awaited, and even longer talked-about, Fusion technology has finally seen the light of day with a few motherboard manufacturers offering boards built around it. Fusion is the world's first APU (Accelerated Processor Unit); a combination of a dual core processor, Northbridge controller and a DX11 supporting graphics processor all built into the same piece of silicon and is AMD's belated riposte to Intel's dual core version of the Atom.

Another score for the H67 chipset

There are some exciting ideas in the Z68 package, but at least in the short term the results they yield in real-world application are a little underwhelming. Buy for the igpu implementation and power saving features, set up an SSD cache, but don't expect your technological world to be blown apart.

A safe and affordable motherboard for next-gen Intel chips

With everything in mind, it's best not to think of the Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 as a cut-price alternative to a proper desktop PC platform. Instead, thanks to support for AMD's excellent UVD3 2D video feature set, it's an excellent basis for a compact, low-power home cinema system.

Basic needn't be a bad thing, if the connection options are covered...

Sapphire uses Lucid HydraLogic to get Multi-GPU on this P67 motherboard

The latest Intel Sandy Bridge chips have dominated CPU-related column inches, for better or for worse, since their release early last month. That said, it's still the Gulftown chips and accompanying X58 chipsets that sit atop the entire Intel range though, for now at least.

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.

With its DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort output options together with the Quick Sync video transcoding technology of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors make Zotac's H67-ITX a good choice to form the basis of a tiny HTPC or media PC.

It may be a basic motherboard, but the Foxconn H61MX is Sandy Bridge for £60

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.

We had high expectations of this Fusion processor, especially when AMD changed its initial sales pitch and suggested Fusion APUs would take aim at lower end Intel netbooks based on the Core i3 processor. However, despite out-of-order instruction execution, the AMD E-350 is not dramatically more powerful than Atom.

We're big fans of NVIDIA's plucky little ION motherboard chipset. What we haven't enjoyed is the feeble Intel Atom processor it's been saddled with. But what if you could have all the yummy graphics goodness of ION combined with a tastier CPU? Luckily, that's the very meaning of the Zotac IONITX-P-E's existence.

Stuffing Intel's desktop-class H55 chipset into a miniscule Mini-ITX motherboard is hardly a standard procedure. However, the Zotac H55-ITX WiFi can't hope to get by based on nothing more than novelty. It must beat the likes of Gigabyte's identically proportioned and similarly specified H55N-USB3.

Workhorse motherboards aimed at embedded and commercial applications tend not to make fine fillies in the context of home PCs. With that in mind, what chance has the Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G in the Mini-ITX motherboard stakes?

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