As always, motherboard selection is down to what features you actually need or will need in the near future... or in some cases the deciding factor may come down to your choice of colour!

A point worth noting is the positioning of the AGP slot in relation to the memory slots with some of these boards; some are so close that you have to take the graphics card out to add more memory. Another annoying aspect of all these boards is the inclusion of a CNR/ANR slot at the expense of a PCI slot, because only vendors will ever find anything to sit in the slot as at the present time there are no CNR cards available for retail sale.

Intel's 845 chipset only provides full support for up to two banks of memory, to a maximum of 2GB, so as 1GB modules of DDR memory are very hard to find and expensive, the boards with more DIMM slots offer a more flexible approach to adding more memory. The Transcend TS-ABR4 is the only board here that offers just two memory slots.

Of the two DDR333 boards, the Aopen AX45 and Asus's P4S 333, the Asus is the faster and better featured board and will appeal to speed freaks. However, a word of caution; they both need to be carefully set up to get the best out of them and, more importantly, the memory is very hard to find at the moment.

If we had to choose one board that combines speed with features then it would be the MSI 845 Ultra ARU. It's a quality board that performs well, has onboard ATA-133 RAID, and comes with four USB 2.0 ports and extra security features together with a very good utility CD. Nice.