Cheap motherboard vs high end?

[Blitz Blitz]

Hi, I wanna ask an question, there is big difference between cheap and expensive mobos in performance? Expensive boards for overclockers, or its upgrade all system performance? Example H81 vs. Z97... Should I buy better board, if i'm not oc'ing?

 

[RCFProd]

I prefer a more high-end motherboard as they are usually packed with nice features. However most cheap motherboards with PCIE X16 slots seem to hold fine for gaming, and more isn't really that necessary. Unless you're interested in overclocking, SLI, high speed memory, better audio, more SATA 6.0GB headers etc.

 

[Gingerbread]

If you are not OCing you should skip on the z97 part altogether. It comes down to h81 vs h97 mainly, with h97 having more features than the h81. If you don't need them you should go for the h81. What h97 has for example is SLI or crossfire support, 4 DIMMs instead of 2, more SATAs, more USBs, better audio codec. However those features are useless for a lot of people. I for example have an every day use computer which doesn't need any of the features that's why I have went for the lowest end chipset.

 

[RCFProd]

If you are not OCing you should skip on the z97 part altogether. It comes down to h81 vs h97 mainly, with h97 having more features than the h81. If you don't need them you should go for the h81. What h97 has for example is SLI or crossfire support, 4 DIMMs instead of 2, more SATAs, more USBs, better audio codec. However those features are useless for a lot of people. I for example have an every day use computer which doesn't need any of the features that's why I have went for the lowest end chipset.

Just for clarification: Only Z97 and Z170 have SLI support, not H97 or H170 chipset (Haswell and Skylake).

 

[Gingerbread]

Yeah I know just didn't bother mentioning it 😀. H97/H170 support just xfire. But most likely a person who is planning on getting low end board won't be going for SLI.

 

[Blitz Blitz]

So it's just features? But overall performance of cpu, ram, hdd, ssd, etc. not changes, if I leave it stock?

 

[Gingerbread]

Well 1600mhz ram works the same way on a h81 and z97, however z97 supports faster ram, but faster is an overstatement because you will never feel it in real world applications. The CPUs runs at the same speed. It doesn't matter for hdd or ssd, so yeah you could say it's the same.