Verdict: Highly overclockable and ludicrously cheap

Quite a few manufacturers appear to have missed the mark when it comes to designing low-cost 915-based motherboards. For example, the Gigabyte has two high-speed PCI-E slots and the MSI supports both DDR and DDR2 memory, which means that both these motherboards end up being relatively expensive.

The Asus P5GPL, on the other hand, seems to have a much better balance between features and price, primarily because it's based on the extremely low-cost 915PL chipset. The 915PL differs from the 915P in that it doesn't support DDR2, and can only support two DDR DIMMs. It's therefore a little strange that the P5GPL has four DIMM sockets, as two are unusable. This isn't a major problem, as long as you steer clear of 256MB DIMMs and buy at least one 512MB DIMM instead.

Fortunately, the 915PL still supports the excellent Intel HD Audio codec, which is handled by a Realtek ALC880 chip. It has all the usual analogue outputs, along with a coaxial S/PDIF output. There are also four USB 2 ports, a single EIDE port and four S-ATA ports.

The P5GPL is a solid performer at the default frequency settings and the BIOS provides quite a few options. You can send up to 1.7V to the CPU, but we wouldn't even bother trying this unless your CPU has superlative cooling. The RAM voltage can be increased up to 2.9V and the Northbridge to 1.6V.

By adjusting these settings, we succeeded in raising the FSB up to 255MHz, the second-highest stable overclock achieved by any board in this Labs test. This is really quite amazing, when you consider that Intel promotes the 915PL chipset for low-cost motherboards.

There's nothing really outstanding about the P5GPL, but what it does offer is good overclockability and solid features at an incredibly low price that undercuts all the other motherboards in this Labs test. However, if you can afford to spend an extra £30 then the Gigabyte has more features and, for a sub-£100 motherboard, is incredibly overclockable.

• 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

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