I decided to build myself a new computer, and as the AMD Duron offered the best power to price ratio I needed a Socket A board. Endless browsing of online shops and hardware sites didn't give me many clues except that the best boards were all over £110.

Then while I was browsing the website of CCL Computers (looking at the price of memory) I found the non-plus version of this board.

It has the Via KT133 Socket A Chipset, which incorporates AGP 4x, UDMA 66, support for PC133 memory, optional 4 usb ports. This is the chipset that all Socket A boards are based on at present. It is also a full ATX board with 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot and an AGP pro slot.

I managed to find a review of the board at www.socketa.com, which rated it 9/10 (this was for the standard board not the plus version), so I went ahead and bought it for just over £90 including VAT.

Upon receiving the board I found that I had in fact received the latest version (plus). This has the added bonus of being able to adjust the multiplier and FSB, through dip switches on the board. At the time very few boards supported this so it was even more of a bargain. Had I wished to I could have over-clocked my Duron 750, and run it even faster.

Installation of the board was very easy. Note that it only has one on-board serial port, the other is on a backplate. The board also has on-board sound, but I have noticed on a friends machine that while the on-board sound is okay for general use, it slows games down quite a bit. Admittedly I only tried Driver with on-board sound but it was enough to convince me a seperate sound card is the best route.

There is also a temperature monitor include in the box, as well as the latest versions of Norton Anti-Virus, Norton Ghost, Symantec Winfax and Farstone Virtual Drive 5.1.

I have now used this board for a month and have suffered no problems whatsoever. A great board at a great price.