Motherboard Recommendations
AMD: If you are in the market to buy an AMD compatible motherboard, I would recommend going with one of a few select manufacturers. Asus, Abit, ECS, DFI, FIC, Gigabyte, Chaintech, and MSI make really good products for today's AMDs. The socket 939 offers a wide variety of chipsets, but the nForce 4 family of chipsets, offer great support for devices, as well as amazing overclocking stability. The VIA chipsets, both in my past experience and with user reviews, offer poor device support, and a slim margin of overclocking, if any. I would also recommend a motherboard that has a PCI-Express or PCI-E slot for the video, instead of the long time king, AGP. The PCI-E opens up the bottleneck, and allows your video card to thrive, giving you better frame rates, clock for clock. A nice thing about PCI-E is the SLI or crossfire support on some of the high end PCI-E cards. Another couple of hot features to look for in a motherboard, if available, are gigabyte ethernet, and SATA. Most new motherboards offer some sort of SATA support, and some high end motherboards have gigabyte ethernet. Both are worth having, but don’t make it your "make or break" point.
Intel: I would recommend the same manufacturers as for the AMD boards, but I would add Intel as a manufacturer to the list. Obviously if its support for their processors, they will make a great product. As much as I hate to admit it the Intel chipset is the best chipset on the market. Clock for clock, if you are doing overclocking, the Intel chipset offers stability even at high temperatures (a feature Intel is very fond of.) The things to look for in an Intel based motherboard are basically the same as if you were buying an AMD based motherboard. I would look for plenty of room for expansion, and the latest and greatest, such as PCI-E, Socket LGA 775, and SATA. Most motherboards that have all of these features, also include a decent integrated sound card.
*After thought*
In this thread I have tried hard to not be bias at all, but this is a recommendation post, and I just feel that you overspend on an Intel board, and get less for your money. Think about it, you get an Intel CPU, Intel Motherboard, and Intel Chipset??? Can you say monopoly? The idea is that there is no other "great" chipset manufacturer for the Intel boards, so they mark their boards up, plain and simple. |