With a price of around $75 the ECS G31T-M is about as cheap as it gets when you want to run a modern Core 2 Duo CPU on a budget motherboard. The board supports all Pentium, Core 2, Core 2 Quad processors, even the new 1333 FSB CPUs. Certainly some things have to be left out when building such a cheap motherboard, for example Gigabit Ethernet or two memory slots. But for a normal desktop, work or basic gaming system this will not really matter. What matters is that the performance compared to high-end motherboards does not suffer at all. If you look at our benchmarks, the board even beats some expensive DDR3 motherboards - when not overclocked.
ECS has only put some very basic overclocking options into the BIOS. You can change memory timings to manual and adjust the CPU FSB. There are no voltage adjustments at all! Also there seems to be some sort of limit when it comes to reaching high FSB speeds. In our testing the board would not go beyond 342 MHz, no matter if with a 266 or 333 FSB CPU. Since most 266 FSB CPUs will run 333 FSB even on stock cooling you can buy a cheap 266 FSB CPU, overclock it to 333 FSB and save even more money while getting free performance.
If you are looking to build a quiet Media PC System, the ECS G31T-M may also be for you. Its integrated Intel VGA is certainly not up to the latest 3D games but movie playback is perfectly fine. A DVI/HDMI output would be nice though to connect your TV Set using a digital connection.