Asus P5K3 Deluxe

The passage of time rapidly turns most PC components from nubile young things into withered old crones. It's just the way of the world. But not this Asus board. It's arguably even more of a goer than it was at launch. It's enough to make you wonder whether there's a portrait of a dusty and desiccated P5K3 hidden in the attic.

The reason for the P5K3's Dorian Gray status, of course, is that Intel's P35 chipset has yet to be eclipsed for pure overclocking. Meanwhile it just gets cheaper. In our tests, it achieved a startling 520MHz bus frequency without northbridge voltage tweaking. It's a great choice for making the most of cheap Intel processors with annoyingly low (and locked) CPU multipliers. Its no-nonsense feature set adds to the built-for-speed allure.

MSI P35 Platinum

The Intel P35 chipset's status as the weapon of choice for overclocking slaps on it perilously lofty expectations. It's easy to forget that it's a mainstream chipset. The same logic applies to MSI's P35 Platinum board.

This is a sub $200 motherboard that nevertheless packs quite a solid feature set, including support for the latest 1,333MHz Intel processors and quality copper cooling for the chipset. Notably, MSI has also plumped for the DDR2 rather than DDR3 memory support, which arguably makes more sense at this price point.

The existence of Asus's P5K3, flattens the P35 Platinum for raw overclockability, though. Granted, a bus speed of 475MHz is far from poor. But the extra 50MHz the Asus achieves crucially maximizes the performance of Intel's cheaper Core 2 chips.