With the release of AMD's Energy Efficient Athlon64, 64 X2 and Sempron AM2 processors, the idea of building a powerful but quiet system into a small form factor case is actually achievable.

At present there are eight CPUs in the range; Athlon64 X2 4600+, 4200+ and 3800+ with a maximum power rating of 65W, and five models with a maximum power rating of 35W; Athlon64 X2 3800+, Athlon64 3500+ and Sempron models 3400+, 3200+ and 3000+.

All have the same core speeds and caches as their power-hungry siblings but with lower power consumption and heat dissipation, which in turn means you can get away with using smaller and quieter cooling fans.

ECS's RS485M-M would make an ideal basis for such a system, especially if you are on a tight budget. Built on the familiar ECS purple PCB, the RS485M-M is a neatly laid out micro-ATX board built around AMD's AM2 socket and using ATI's Xpress 1150 chipset (ATI RS485 Northbridge, SB460 Southbridge combination).

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This means it's not as feature-rich as some microATX boards, which is reflected in its price. What the chipset does have in its favour, however, is that because it's basically a mobile chipset it comes with power conservation at its heart. This also allows both chipsets to be passively cooled.

Two DIMM slots are provided, supporting DDR2 memory in 800/667/533 and 400MHz speeds. As usual these days there are just single ATA and floppy ports, but you do get four SATA ports which can be used to build either RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays via the Southbridge. Integrated into the board are LAN (but not Gigabit) and 6-channel audio, and on this board these are joined by integrated graphics.

Said graphics are powered by ATI's Radeon X300 GPU clocked at 300MHz, sharing up to 256MB of system memory. This may not sound much, but it's still powerful enough to let you run the Aero Glass interface for Vista's Premium version, although the board also provides an x16 PCI-E slot so you could upgrade to a graphics card or - better still for a media centre - a TV card.

The locking latch for this PCI-E slot is one of the annoying features of this board as it is the very small latch that ECS seems so fond of using, which is a real pain (literally) to use when the slot is occupied by a card. You also get two PCI slots and the obligatory x1 PCI-E slot which will remain empty for the time being, as nobody seems to be in too much of a rush to build cards to fill it.

To help keep the costs down the bundle supplied with the RS485M-M is Spartan to say the least; manual, driver CD, floppy, IDE and single SATA data cables, and a single SATA power cable. Disappointingly there is no TV-out bracket included, which is a shame considering that the board would make an ideal basis for a media centre.

Not as feature-rich as some micro-ATX motherboards, and this is reflected in the price, but if you are looking for a board that covers the basics well, then the RS485M-M is worth your attention.