The latest refresh of Intel’s chipsets is almost complete, replacing the P965 and X975 models.

It all started with the G35 chipset, which introduced DDR3 and 1,333MHz front-side bus (FSB) support, required by the latest quad-core processors.

The final chipset is the G38, due out in October, but for now ECS has produced a motherboard on Intel’s new budget design, the G33.

It’s a Micro ATX board measuring just 244x244mm, so is ideal for small home theatre PCs. Intel's new X3100 chip which has theoretical support for high-definition playback, but at the time of writing there is no playback software that supports it. In addition, the motherboard only has an analogue VGA ouput, which potentially puts a dampener on encrypted content from HD DVDs and Blu-ray disks.

A single x16 PCI Express card does justice to the fastest of graphics cards, we even plugged in a monster Radeon HD 2900XT and it worked fine.

Although the G33 supports six Sata (serial ATA) ports and Firewire, ECS has only included plugs for four Sata and left out Firewire altogether. There are markings for a connector on the motherboard and ECS even refers to it as a feature in the manual, but the pins are missing on the internal Firewire connection.

A floppy disk connecter sits inside at the expense of a parallel ATA port, which presents a problem for older optical and hard drives.

The Bios is a limited affair and we’d prefer greater control over memory timings and latencies. The fact that you can’t clock Ram higher than 800MHz will disappoint enthusiasts, but is enough for most systems.

The G33 is as fast as G35 and X975-based motherboards, which is astonishing considering the price. For simple systems with a single graphics card and not too many hard disks, the ECS G33T-M2 is a great small and cheap motherboard.