One of the first motherboards to hit the shelves using Intel's new Series 3 chipsets came not from one of the usual suspects - Asus, MSI or Gigabyte - but from Foxconn. You may not have heard the name before, but it is one of the largest companies in the IT industry. How big? Well, put it this way: nearly every motherboard you ever see will have a Foxconn component on it somewhere.

Foxconn's P35A is a no-frills motherboard built around - surprise, surprise - Intel's P35 chipset. If you know of Foxconn already you may be stunned by the simplicity of the product name, as normally it seems that people in Foxconn's marketing division have an almost sadistic approach to naming products by using a lengthy mix of numbers and letters.

Previously best known by the codename Bearlake, Intel's Series 3 chipsets are intended to replace the current 965/975 products and will come in a number of flavours, but the first ones to be released are the P35 (mainstream) and the G33 (mainstream but with the latest integrated GMA 3100 graphics).

The P35 brings support for 1,333MHz FSB speeds (important for the next generation 45-nm processors) and a built-in DDR3 memory controller, as well as support for DDR2, up to six SATA devices and eSATA (external SATA). To accompany the new Northbridge there is a new ICH9 Southbridge which comes in RAID and non-RAID versions.

Foxconn's P35A, built on a blue PCB, is a well laid-out board with room around all the major components, and supports all Intel LGA775 quad and dual core and Pentium 4 CPUs. Foxconn has matched the P35 Northbridge with the standard version of the ICH9 Southbridge so you don't get any integrated RAID support - if you are looking for that you need the P35A's sibling, the P35A-S. Both the bridges are passively cooled as are the voltage regulators.

As you might expect of a major player in the motherboard components game, a lot of attention has been paid to the quality of certain items. In place of the cheaper and inferior electrolytic capacitors found on many motherboards, Foxconn has used solid ones which should give more stability, especially as you start to play around with overclocking settings.

To enable cleaner cable runs, the main 24-pin power connector is mounted at the edge of the motherboard, as are the floppy and ATA ports, while the four SATA 2 ports are placed at the bottom right-hand edge of the board.

The four DIMM slots support up to a maximum of 8GB of 533/667/800/1066MHz DDR2 memory and are mounted far enough up the board so as to not obstruct the main x16 PCI-E graphics slot. Between this slot and the second graphics slot (which only runs at x4 speed) are an x1 PCI-E slot and the first of three standard PCI slots. Although the board has two PCI-E graphic slots running at different speeds, you can still install a CrossFire graphics card setup into the P35A and get the benefits of a dual card arrangement.

An interesting addition to the board, especially for those who like to tinker with motherboards out of a case, are the onboard power and reset buttons, while the easy-to-get-to 'clear CMOS' jumper is also noteworthy.

Also featured on the board are integrated 10-channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet and headers for an additional eight USB 2.0 ports, in addition to the four on the rear I/O panel.

The P35A performs wells and it's nice to see a motherboard that's not loaded to the gills with expensive extra features that in all probability will never be used. Foxconn's P35A is a good, solid, mainstream performer, but some people may be put off by the price.