This summer we posted our roundup of Socket AM3 mainboards  from the leading mainboard makers, such as ASRock, Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI. All mainboards were based on the latest chipset consisting of an AMD 890FX North Bridge and SB850 South Bridge. A little earlier we studied the features and functionality of two flagship mainboards from Asus and Gigabyte  based on the same chipset. The chipset proved to be really good, and so did most of the tested mainboards. However, the price of these products being around $200 or even higher seems to be way too much. As a result, the overall platform  cost doesn’t allow it to compete successfully against an alternative built with an Intel CPU and chipset. However, you really need an AMD 980FX based mainboard only if you are going to use multiple graphics accelerators in a CrossFire configuration: two graphics cards working at full PCI Express 2.0 x16 speed, or four graphics cards working at x8 speed. If you do not have anything like that in mind, then you should be more than happy with an AMD 870 based mainboard, as it will offer the same basic features, but at only half the price! A contemporary multi-functional mainboard for only $100 – could you dream of anything better than that? Today we are going to introduce to you several mainboards like that.