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

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

Foxconn is back in the motherboard market, and it's good timing what with Intel's Sandy Bridge launch, so here's its high-end board, the originally-named P67A-S.

Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors are stupidly, impossibly, hilariously quick. By some metrics, they're the most impressive new CPUs in memory. However, one of the downsides is the requirement for a new motherboard. Still, if you're going to make the migration to a new Sandy Bridge system, why not consider a small-form-factor board, such as the Foxconn H67S?

Is it worth using a simple motherboard for high-end processors?

Black Ops traditionally refers to a group of soldiers who answer to no government and are unidentifi able. Which is kind of bad news if you've just bought a BlackOps motherboard – who do you return it to if it goes wrong? There's probably a secret BIOS setting that sends Jason Bourne crashing into your house, only for him to shoot you in the head and make off with your beloved mobo. Well, actually it just goes through the normal channels. Missed opportunity there – nil points for marketing.

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.

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 it's value you seek from an Athlon motherboard, you can do an awful lot worse than Winfast's NVIDIA 570-powered offering. Each one of the six SATA hard drive ports is RAID enabled and there's a pair of gigabit LAN ports

There are a lot of Intel 965-based boards out there. What chance of success can there possibly be, then, for Foxconn's take on the default LGA775-socket chipset for Core 2 processors?

Better known as one the biggest suppliers of OEM boards to the likes of Dell, Foxconn has now set its sights on the retail market. And if this NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI-based Athlon AM2 board is anything to go by, big, established brands such as ASUS had better pay attention to this new heavyweight.

The lack of support for SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU shenanigans aside, we had high hopes for this Intel 965-based Foxconn board. After all, the 965 chipset is pretty much the proven king of Core 2 overclocking.

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...