Introduction

While at TweakTown we do try to look as close to each market segment as we can, we sometimes overlook the value market. We are sent quite a lot of high-end motherboards and it’s very rare that a budget board crosses our labs; however, we are always happy to test.

Value boards are what you would most likely get in a pre-built system from your local computer shop when you are not going for huge gaming performance or a massive OC. We have already looked at AMD’s new 690G chipset for the AM2 with onboard graphics, and today we are taking a look at the Core 2 side of things.

ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) has been good enough to supply us with its latest model called the 965PLT-A. While the board has “965” in its name, it does not actually feature a 965 chipset. In fact it is based on the new 946GZ chipset from Intel, designed with the new GMA 3000 graphics chip embedded in the northbridge.

We plan to test this chipset to see how it performs compared to a 6200 TurboCache graphics card as well as our normal tests with the Radeon X1950Pro. So come have a look at the latest board to cross our labs.