The Foxconn K8M890M2MA-R2SH is an amazingly cheap Socket AM2 motherboard, which sounds like it ought to be the conclusion to a review but in reality it's a good starting point. There's only one way that a manufacturer comes up with a motherboard that sells for such a low price, and that's by using every feature that the chipset has to offer without bolting on any extra whatsoever.

The chipset in question is the VIA K8M890 which includes VIA/S3G DeltaChrome graphics and a VT8237R Plus Southbridge. There are two DDR2 memory slots so you get proper dual channel memory support, and if the integrated graphics aren't sufficient you can plug a proper graphics card into the PCI Express x16 slot.

In addition there is a PCI-E x1 slot and two PCI slots. The Southbridge supports RAID 0 or 1 for the pair of SATA connectors and there are four USB 2.0 ports on the I/O panel, with two USB headers that may prove useful if your case supports extra ports.

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Evidence of cost-cutting is limited, but there's 10/100Mbps LAN rather than Gigabit and the 6-channel audio uses the AC'97 codec and only has three mini jacks for connection.

Other than that, the BIOS supports overclocking and allows you to separate the PCI Express and PCI buses, which is handy if you have a sound card and don't fancy causing audio problems as you increase clock speeds.

During our testing with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+, an Asus EN7950GT graphics card, 2GB of Corsair XMS2 memory and a Raptor 150GB hard drive we found that the Foxconn performed as well as motherboards that used the latest Nvidia Nforce 590 SLI and ATi Radeon Xpress 3200 chipsets.

Switching to the integrated graphics was a bit of a shock as VIA/S3G DeltaChrome supports Shader Model 2 (DirectX 9.0b) and is very slow indeed. We were able to see the 'page loading' message for a fraction of a second when we opened the BBC News website which simply doesn't happen when you use proper graphics, whether or not they are integrated. We also detected a constant shimmering effect on our test CRT monitor which isn't present when you use integrated graphics from ATi or Nvidia.

For a laugh we ran 3DMark06, but the test crashed on the default setting of 64MB of memory. We increased the setting to 256MB and got a score of 115 marks which is clearly feeble compared to Nvidia's GeForce 6100 which scores 207 marks in a similar set-up. The Asus 7950GT scored 5,268 marks.

The other problem with the DeltaChrome IGP is that it is incapable of supporting the Aero interface in Windows Vista Premium and while it will run Windows Vista Basic, that's a fairly serious drawback.

Foxconn has come up with an incredibly cheap AM2 motherboard that offers a full range of integrated features including fairly basic graphics. To get the best from this model you need to use a plug-in graphics card, but even so it's a superb basis for a cheap PC.