Verdict: Incredibly cheap and incredibly rubbish

Back in the days of Athlon XP and Socket 754 Athlon 64 CPUs, a lot of motherboards were based around VIA chipsets. These days, VIA has been shoved out of the limelight by ATi, Intel and Nvidia. However, we managed to find one VIA-based Core 2 motherboard, the MSI P4M890M.

The P4M890M is based around the VIA P4M890 chipset, so it supports all current LGA775 CPUs, including the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme. You'd have to be completely mad to use the VIA UniChrome Pro GPU integrated into the Northbridge, as it's such a poor performer. Fortunately, there's a 16x PCI-E slot for a decent graphics card, plus two PCI slots and a single 1x PCI-E slot. Considering its incredibly low price, it's amazing that MSI has managed to squeeze an 8-channel Intel HD Audio chip on the P4M890M, although it doesn't have any digital outputs.

Unfortunately, the P4M890M proved to be an abysmal performer in both our Media Benchmarks and our game test, Need for Speed: Most Wanted. In fact, it's so slow, it feels as though your Core 2 is pretending to be a Pentium D. No wonder VIA has lost so much chipset market share to ATi, Intel and Nvidia.

The BIOS has the option to increase the FSB up to 500MHz but, without the ability to increase the CPU voltage, such a high FSB option is completely unrealistic. Even more worryingly, the BIOS has no PCI lock - there are just four dividers, so you have to be extremely careful when increasing the FSB. As a result, we could only overclock the FSB of our test Core 2 Duo CPU from 266MHz to 280MHz. However, as the P4M890M is so slow to start with, it was slower than any of the other Core 2 motherboards at their stock settings.

The P4M890M proves that it's possible to buy a motherboard for Intel's wondrous Core 2 CPU for less than £50. However, this board is so incredibly slow that buying it is a false economy. If you're on a tight budget, make a beeline for Gigabyte's GA-945PL-S3 instead.

• 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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