Verdict: A great overclocker, but it lacks pizzazz.

The Mars was first shown at the Computex trade show in Taiwan back in June, but it's taken Foxconn several months to prepare the design for mass production.

Apart from taking its name from the Roman god of war, the Mars doesn't appear to have assumed any other Roman characteristics, such as ruthlessness and the cutting-edge technology. In fact, the Mars is based on the P35 chipset and was originally intended to compete with the Asus Blitz Extreme, a model that Asus has already discontinued. As a result, the Mars is left to compete with more ordinary Asus P35 motherboards such as the P5K Premium WiFi-AP.

The Mars has two full-length PCI-E slots in order to support CrossFire but, as the second 16x PCI-E slot provides only four PCI-E lanes, it will limit performance. At least there are three PCI slots and a pair of 1x PCI-E slots to fill with additional cards. You won't need to add much to the Mars though; it has six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, support for up to 8GB of DDR2, and its Intel HD Audio codec has coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs. There's even Gigabit LAN and 12 USB 2 ports should you feel the need to plug in every item in Custom Kit this month. Like most high-end P35 motherboards, the Mars uses a combination of heatsinks and heatpipes to keep the Northbridge, Southbridge and VRMs cool.

The Mars delivers solid performance at its stock settings, but shines when it's overclocked. The BIOS has the ability to send a huge amount of voltage through the Mars' major components, including a lightning-like 2.395V through the Northbridge. There are also four user-configurable BIOS profiles, although we foundthat the BIOS didn't auto-recover as claimed when we overclocked it too far, necessitating a CMOS clear to get it working again. After finding that the Mars could easily max out our test CPU at its default multiplier, we tested it with the multiplier lowered to six. At this setting, with 1.625V coursing through the Northbridge and the VTT set to 1.65V, the Mars topped out with an impressive maximum stable FSB of 530MHz.

The Mars is one of the best overclocking motherboards we've had the pleasure of testing but, for a P35 motherboard that lacks any special features, such as WiFi, it's a little too expensive to be truly competitive.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• Intel DG45FC - Motherboards
• Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD - Hard disks / storage
• OCZ Core Series 30GB - Hard disks / storage
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games