Quality shouldn’t be sacrificed for price but a hardware that’s too pricey kills the budget. Palit, when they entered the motherboard market, took this into consideration and came up with the N73PV motherboard.

Palit aimed for the value-added market with a small form factor (SFF) micro-ATX board. True that it is quite smaller than the usual ATX form motherboard, but can still fit into any casing and carry out most applications with a good setup.

The small form of the N73PV supports Intel LGA775 processors, ranging from Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4, and Celeron D with 533 / 800 /1066/1333 Front Side Bus (FSB). It can handle processors better than most other boards in terms of running applications that are processor-intensive - making it one of your better price to performance ratio boards.

The motherboard comes with two DDR2 DIMM slots for RAM, one PCIe x16 slot, one PCIe x1 slot, and two PCI slots for hardware expansion. It also comes with its own built-in GPU and features a VGA port and a DVI port at the rear. Palit claims that the 3-phase PWM with aluminum capacitors will save power and lower overall power consumption.

All the more reason to get the Palit N73PV is the built-in HD audio, which is new to the value-added motherboard segment. The onboard GeForce 7100 GPU may not be at par with , but the whole system is fairly stable and should last you a while until you feel the need to go a step higher. Although for the tech head newbie and the normal app user, the Palit N73PV’s performance should suffice for quite some time.

The board bundles only a few necessities like a single SATA cable, one driver disc, a manual, one power cable adapter and one back panel. But installation of the N73PV is fairly easy. Despite the low price, build quality is reasonable enough that you don’t need to worry too much.