Question What is the difference between £200 and £300 motherboards?

[Gamefreaknet]

Quick Note: For title I meant £300+ motherboards
So yes I know (kinda) that there may be differences with the onboard hardware like:
ATX, M-ATX, ITX, M-ITX, etc... , Supported Intel Chips, Ethernet/Wireless Card and Capabilities, Max Supported memory, connectors (like USB A 3.2, etc...) but if I were to get 2 motherboards of exact (or very near exact) same spec (links below for motherboards being compared) what would differ? Like would the memory/data lanes be faster, general better reliability, etc...?
£200 Motherboard - Here (£210 to be exact currently)
£300 Motherboard - Here (£310 to be exact currently)

By checking the differences of spec on the PCPartPicker "detailer" that shows what each motherboard has, supports, etc... I couldn't see much difference aside from a few USB-A ports difference and looks however everything else was the same. Both had 2.5Gbps Ethernet, WiFi 6, supported up to 128GB memory (both supported up to DDR5 6400mhz) and the cheaper motherboard even actually had more PCIE slots (1 extra PCIE x1 if you went with it).
Basically why are those £250/£300+ motherboards being sold for such high prices if you can quite easily get something that has everything that more expensive motherboard has for less. Are the PCIE lanes made/designed better for faster "communication" between components, better lifespan (will last longer), something else? As the only real difference I saw was the variant of Wireless/Wired Adapter and maybe looks but nothing much else.

 

[Math Geek]

there is more than just the connections.

a cheap board may have a ton of slots/connections, but if you read the fine print you'll see that using an m.2 slot disables multiple sata ports, or slows down a pcie slot or other limitations. a higher end board adds extra controllers to be able to run most if not all of the connections at the same time.

extra pcie slots are nice but a cheap board will likely only support x8 for second slot and a third slot is often only like 3.0 x 4 instead of the 4.0 the first slot can do. lots of other limitations you have to read deeper to see.

power delivery is also important and a cheap board will likely have much less robust vrm's and such. this is very important when dealing with 250w+ cpu's we have all over the place right now. so don't just look at a simple listing on partpicker. look closer, check out a review or 2 if available and then make an informed decision based on your needs and what you can afford. there are a lot of threads here every day that start with "my mobo only supports 1 m.2 slot, how do i get more??". and lots of other "how do i add features my mobo did not come with?" the answer is get a new mobo that has what you need.

if you do your homework before buying, you'll not have any problems and get right to enjoying your system

for example, my mobo has 6 sata ports and 2 m.2 slots. however, each m.2 slot disables 2 of the sata ports. i have 2 nvme drives which means my "6 sata ports" is actually only 2 usable ones. my mobo can deliver about 200w of power max. my cpu can use 250w on torture load. grant it, day to day i rarely see 150w used, but i know i will never see that 250w load if i ever decide to render or other high power draw activites out of my system. no big deal as i won't be doing it, but it is good to know ahead of time, this was a limit.

 

[Nighthawk117]

More expensive boards tend to have more features, better quality components, beefier power delivery with better VRM cooling. Would I expect a £200 or £300 board to last longer paired with a i7 13700K than a £100 board, then the answer is yes.

Neither of those boards are bad boards though. I would not expect the £200 to have a short lifespan or anything like that. The number of PCI-E lanes is dependant on the chipset rather than the board, but there is flexibility on how manufacturers use them.

What chip did you intend on pairing your CPU with? I would not get either of those for anything extreme like overclocking a 13900K.