Every motherboard in this group uses an Intel chipset and supports the new 800MHz FSB, apart from the Mercury NDSMx. It stands out even further as it is a micro-ATX design with integrated graphics, and to cap it all it's priced at a tiny £36 plus VAT.

The key to this motherboard is the SiS 650GL chipset which supports the 533MHz Northwood B, but not the 800MHz Northwood C. As part of our testing we plugged in a 3.06GHz Northwood B, rather than the 3.0GHz Northwood C we used in the other boards, and the Mercury surprised us by getting test results that were within 20% of the Epox in Sysmark. That's a big performance gap of course, but it's also a little irrelevant as we can't see anyone investing big money in a fast Pentium 4 to plug into this motherboard.

It is much more likely that you'd put it in a tiny case as the basis for a digital video recorder, or to play DVDs, or you may simply want a small PC for e-mail duties.
The integrated SiS graphics would be relatively hopeless for any gaming much beyond Freecell, but they save you the cost of a graphics card.

There's yet another oddity on this motherboard as it has two DDR memory slots and also two SDR slots. You can use one memory type at a time and as SDR is the same price as DDR it only makes sense if you are upgrading and have memory that you wish to re-use. The combination of SDR and a Pentium 4 won't help performance one little bit.

You won't be surprised to find that you get no accessories in the box besides a couple of IDE cables, but at this price we can't complain. You'll need to add a modem or network card to make this into a fully functional PC, but it is likely to be incredibly cheap and very good value.