At the end of the day, for £45 this board is inexpensive as opposed to cheap. It's a quality product with a lot going for it, even though it doesn't have the full package and some socket placements are a bit iffy. If you can live with just 720p or 1080i (providing you aren't using an LCD HDTV with the latter) then it can play back both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs as long as you're willing to shell out for the expensive player on top.

The MSI K9AGM2 is more stable and does the fundamental job just as well, but the Biostar TF7050-M2 has a few more features here and there but only lasted the eight hours under serious load. The real kicker is Nvidia's driver limitation on 1080p support, regardless of attempted playback or even overclocking the IGP.