Verdict: Cheap, but not particularly cheerful.

While the nForce 680i SLI chipset was very popular among the manufacturers of this year's Dream PCs, Nvidia also produces a far cheaper chipset, the nForce 650i SLI, which features on MSI's budget P6N SLI V2.

Both nForce 6-series chipsets support SLI dual graphics, but the 650i SLI has fewer PCI-E lanes than the 680i SLI. This means that when two graphics cards are fitted, each of its high-speed PCI-E slots will provide eight lanes of bandwidth, as opposed to 16 with the 680i. The difference in bandwidth means that the performance of an SLI dual-graphics setup will be lower on a 650i board than on a 680i. Unlike a 680i SLI board, you'll also have to flip a SODIMM card to engage SLI mode, but as you're only likely to do this once, it isn't a major inconvenience.

Nvidia chipsets have a reputation for producing a lot of waste heat, but the Northbridge and Southbridge are fitted with simple heatsinks, while the VRMs are left uncooled. In addition to the two high-speed PCI-E slots, there are two PCI slots and a pair of 1x PCI-E slots. The nForce Southbridge provides four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, eight USB 2 ports and Intel HD Audio plus a totally useless serial port.

The P6N SLI V2 was very sluggish in our benchmarks, achieving an overall score of just 864. Clearly, the 650i SLI chipset is no match for the Intel P31, P35 and X38 chipsets when it comes to raw performance. This is hardly surprising, as Intel has always made the highest-performance chipsets for its CPUs. Not only that, but the P6N SLI V2 also proved to be a poor overclocker, failing to max out our test CPU, which is capable of a 458MHz FSB. In fact, even with the Northbridge voltage raised to 1.35V and the FSB voltage increased by 12 per cent, the P6N SLI V2 gave up at 440MHz, refusing to go any higher even with all the voltages maxed out. Worse still, despite having a CPU multiplier option in the BIOS, it appeared to have no effect, so were we unable to push the FSB any higher. Still, the P6N SLI V2 did overclock further than the much more expensive nForce 680i SLI-based XFX MB-680-ISH9 reviewed above.

Although the P6N SLI V2 resides at the cheaper end of the motherboard market, its poor stock performance and limited overclocking potential mean that you should steer clear of it and buy an Intel-based motherboard instead.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

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