Best Of Tom’s Hardware: Beginner’s Guide To Motherboard Selection

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I just built a new rig: Asus Rampage II Gene, i7 920 (upgrading to i7 930 when out), G. Skill Trident F3-12800CL6T-6GBTD, Using a PNY Nvidia GTS 250 1GB until the GF480/470 comes out (unless they are priced way too high else I'll go ATI), 2 x Samsung F3 1TB RAID0, 2 x WD Caviar Black 1TB, 2 x WD Raptar 10K RPM 37GB RAID0, Corsair HX1000 PSU. I built my own open-air case using angled and flat aluminumn. I then used rivets to put it together. 😉 Dimensions are 15in(W) x 6in(H) x 12in(L). Sprayed the case a flat black. The whole rig is small, sturdy, and powerful. What else can you ask for. I'll take some pictures and post soon. I didn't use SSD drives because I don't think they are for me just yet.
 
For all you beginners out there I recommend gigabyte mobos. They are hard to break. Asus are good too. I really like the heavy construction of the gigabyte mobos, and they are typically top notch when in comes to overclocking. The bios options are really good.
My last 3 systems both amd and intel have had gigabyte mobos. They take a licking and keep on ticking.

Either way its good to check articles and forums for specific features. If you want fail safe compatibility buy quality parts, a big case with plenty of fans, and if you even have the slightest urge to overclock buy an aftermarket cooler and some arctic silver 5. If you don't know what AS5 is for you better do some reading before you build your own 😀
 
I purchased an MSI P55-GD80 and I love it. I didn't have any problems during the install and haven't had a problem since. I used to use Asus boards all the time, but this time I found that MSI gave me the same if not better features and reliability for a cheaper price than Asus.
 
Speaking from personal experience, I have to mention that builders should absolutely AVOID the nForce chipset, at least the 750 and 780. There is a video corruption bug which is linked directly to the chipset, which has still (!) not been fixed by NVidia despite being a problem for about 2 years. Basically if you display any type of video other than OpenGL (higher risk with flash video and small .wmv for some reason), the cursor and video will become garbled, and a few seconds later will do a hard reboot. As far as I know there is still no fix for this, and it's the main reason why I went to the X58 chipset and a new processor. Oh, and it was paired with an Nvidia graphics card, so no issues of "compatibility."
 
Very nice article, even good for people who know more than begginers but would like to look at the recent history in an articulate and well presented way. And even those who always bought Intel or AMD and are thinking of assembling a system with AMD or Intel parts this time and want to get confortable doing it.

Just one lapse in the article though:

IN the "Choosing the Right Chipset" page, in the Northbridge for 775 section, you forgot the P31 Chipset, and probably therefore also forgot to mention in the Southbridge section that the ICH7 also mates said P31 chipset.

And while you are right that thte photo you link to doesn't show PATA support, this other link (http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=27679) does publicly document it's presence. And I can guarantee it does. I bought such a motherboard, a Gigabyte P31-S3G a year and a half ago. Pretty good features for the money at the time.

Another correction, both G31 and P31 feature 6 PCIe 1.1 lanes (http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/317495.pdf - diagram for both on page 16 and 17), and there you can also see a branch for the Intel PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet in there, and also why the motherboard I bought has is.
 
Thank you much for the info on modern chipset features. I've been looking for that for some time now.
And as a request could we have a best motherboards for the money article on each modern slot type? anyone else who wants this speak up so we'll get it
 
I have Asus M4A785-M, that I bought on combo with Athlon II X4. It is a great board, with 4 memory slots. It doesn't have dual LAN and Firewire, but it does have integrated video and HDMI out. ONLY one PCI Express, which is 2.0. I am using it as a regular ATX board, since it supports up to 125W processor and it has 6 SATA ports. It does have integrated IDE slot/two channel and 8 channel HiDef Audio. It sells for around $70, if you cannot get it free with combo. you will need DDR3 for this board.

My personal experience with expensive boards shows, that until I manage to utilize all the features on a high-end board, the board gets outdated and useless.

I highly recommend M4A785-M for anybody with single high-end graphics card. Mine is Radeon 5850 - very fast thing and very cool /40-50 Celsius/. My only wish is ATI to improve the Avivo converter, because now it is kind of buggy. The Avivo conversion is like 20 times faster than using CPU only - crazy fast staff.
 

Looking forward to that too. I put down my own philosophies on how to spec out a rig a while ago. Needs a thorough update, but been reading PSU reviews for Proximon's Big List instead. But the philosophies remain the same. I think choosing the CPU first is a big mistake from a gaming perspective. See how I think out a rig here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/269589-31-index-skora-topics#t1973240
 
[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]No, it's not, read the publishing date:http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,1289.html[/citation]
I stand correct 😀 😛 I hadn't seen or read the original one posted back in 2006, so I was only aware of his sticky. Either way both this article and Proximon's sticky are great tools for beginners to learn about motherboards and their features.
 
[citation][nom]tecmo34[/nom]I stand correct I hadn't seen or read the original one posted back in 2006, so I was only aware of his sticky. Either way both this article and Proximon's sticky are great tools for beginners to learn about motherboards and their features.[/citation]

Ooops I never saw that either. Crashman is justifiably defensive since he actually gets paid for this sort of thing. I'll be sure to link this article in my guide.
 
Crasman started in the forums a Loooong time ago. Very very knowledgable person.
It's good to see his articles, and kknow he is finally getting paid for all of his help and expertise he put into the forums way back then.
Thanks Crashman for all of the advice and knowledge you have posted over the years.
Rick
 
[citation][nom]Rick_Criswell[/nom]Crasman started in the forums a Loooong time ago. Very very knowledgable person.It's good to see his articles, and kknow he is finally getting paid for all of his help and expertise he put into the forums way back then. Thanks Crashman for all of the advice and knowledge you have posted over the years.Rick[/citation]

You're welcome! I'm here to help!
 
I've had problems with my Gigabyte MA790FX-UD5P. The OnBoard controller (JMicron controller) is unstable and stops working occasionally. Sometimes BIOS fails to detect the hard drives attached to it, the hard drives fail multiple read tests and OpenSolaris doesn't agree at all with drives attached to this controller.

Anyone else having problems with their onboard SATA controllers? I think most people don't care as the OnChip (Southbridge) controller provide enough ports for most users.

But I cannot recommend this board if you need many SATA ports since the controller is defective. And if you don't, it's better to choose a board with more 4 PCIe x16 slots (this board only has 2) so that you can install an additional SAS controller when you need to expand and still be able to use crossfire. The MegaRAID controllers beats the crap out of any onchip controller unless you buy a server mobo from e.g. Tyan.
 
Excellent background on the features of the various CPUs, chipsets, and practical tips for selecting boards. It always helps to know what you want the system to do before you choose any of the components.
 
EVGA X58 Tri SLI board, perfect and flawless to overclock with, have an I7 920 at 4GHZ stable, and air cooled on a V8. 2xGTX285 2GB G-cards with an X-fi Titanium sound card. 6GB of 1600mhz ram.

This mobo is a beast, and doesn't fail me at all. Best board i've ever played with to date.
 
What about Biostar? they make some decent boards, Im running the biostar TA790GX A3+ with a athlon and got it @ 3.25 Ghz stable at stock volts (only down side is i cant change the voltage so im lucky its fine at stock xD)
 
[citation][nom]Straydog[/nom]What about Biostar? they make some decent boards, Im running the biostar TA790GX A3+ with a athlon and got it @ 3.25 Ghz stable at stock volts (only down side is i cant change the voltage so im lucky its fine at stock xD)[/citation]

What about Biostar? I don't see anything in the article about brand preference?
 
Having built dozens of systems, this article is good because it gave some points even I learned from, and I consider myself an expert at building and debugging pc's (since I do it for a living). In fact, many of my coworkers are impressed with the depth and accuracy of this article. Kudos to you, Tom
 
[citation][nom]insightdriver[/nom]Having built dozens of systems, this article is good because it gave some points even I learned from, and I consider myself an expert at building and debugging pc's (since I do it for a living). In fact, many of my coworkers are impressed with the depth and accuracy of this article. Kudos to you, Tom[/citation]

Thanks insightdriver. It might have read slightly better had we rewritten it entirely, but we wanted to retain as much of the 2006 article as possible for the sake of history. Adding specific chipset information and checking it across two sources (to make sure nothing was forgotten) was the most time-consuming part, and we're still interested in readers pointing out anything that might have slipped past us. Remember that there are fans for every one of those chipsets who have details not mentioned in the marketing documents.
 
I'm a fairly experienced builder, but I've been out of the game for a number of years. My last build (and my current desktop) was an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 2.0 GB, Radeon X1650 512M, so I'm way behind on the current state of the art. This was a great article to get me back up to speed a bit.

Thanks!
 
[citation][nom]groggluebutt[/nom]I'm a fairly experienced builder, but I've been out of the game for a number of years. My last build (and my current desktop) was an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 2.0 GB, Radeon X1650 512M, so I'm way behind on the current state of the art. This was a great article to get me back up to speed a bit.Thanks![/citation]

You're welcome! Tom's wants to be your number one source for hardware information!
 

:pt1cable: And we want Tom's to be our number one source for advertisial (yep, made it up on the spot) brainwashing. :bounce:

For some reason, I've lost the urge to gamble. Strange!
 
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