There seems to be no limit to the cost of high-end motherboards; charging £180-£250 for a motherboard is the norm these days, but what about us mere mortals? What we could do with is a feature-rich motherboard costing around fifty quid. That's just daydreaming, I hear you say. No, not any longer: step forward Gigabyte's GA-P31-DS3L.

As you might have guessed from its product name, the board is built around Intel's P31, one of the company's new mainstream chipsets, and supports Socket 775 processors with 1333/1066 and 800MHz FSB speeds. That includes Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad CPUs and the upcoming 45nm processors, which is not bad for a bargain-priced board.

Gigabyte has paired the P31 Northbridge with the previous generation ICH7 Southbridge which means you don't get any RAID support for the four SATA 3Gbps ports that sit towards the bottom of the board. Under these SATA ports sits the lone ATA/100 port.

The board is neatly laid out on a blue PCB with both bridges passively cooled. It even features solid capacitors, something normally associated with much more expensive boards; using these solid capacitors allows for more stable operations particularly when overclocking. Talking of overclocking, Gigabyte includes its MIT (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) in the GA-P31-DS3L's BIOS. The MIT allows for tweaks to the system voltage, memory and PCI Express frequency amongst others.

The four DIMM slots support up to 4GB of 1066/800/667MHz DDR2 memory and these are placed far enough up the board that their locking latches don't get in the way of the single x16 PCI-E graphics slot. The slot itself has an easy-access locking latch which makes a nice change to the fumbling around you have to do with some. As well as the graphics card slot, you get three x1 PCI and three standard PCI slots.

Despite the price tag, the board comes with both Gigabit Ethernet (RTL 8111B) and 8-channel audio (Realtek ALC888) complete with single co-axial and optical S/PDIF ports on the rear panel. These are joined by two PS/2 ports, single parallel and serial ports and four USB 2 ports.

To keep the price down the box bundle is very light but all the essentials are included: a couple of SATA cables, single ATA and floppy cables, a very well laid-out manual, a useful multi-lingual setup poster and a driver CD that includes Gigabyte's EasyTune5, a Windows-based overclocking and PC health monitoring utility.

To get both 8-channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet on a board that costs under fifty quid is impressive enough, but when you add in support for all the latest Intel processors including the 1333MHz FSB ones, then Gigabyte's GA-P31-DS3L becomes a very desirable board for those with shallow pockets who don't need or want the huge feature list of some of the more expensive boards available.