What makes a good motherboard?

[Scottler]

Hey gang...I've been toying with the idea of building a system sometime in the near future, but I have no idea what makes a good mobo...

I'm not looking for specific recommendations on brands or models, I'm looking for what features and capabilities should I be looking for?

[congo]

Look only at the latest chipsets and choose one with the features you want.

The rest will follow.

Narrow it down to a few boards and then google up some reviews and user comments.  

[Scottler]

Thanks for the info, Congo!

[congo]

Here is an example of an nForce4 SLI board. The SLI gives the option of having 2 graphics cards in a PCIe bus.

http://www.msi.com.tw/html/newsrelease/ ... 301003.htm

Personally, I feel as if SLI is a sales gimmick aimed at fat wallets.

Other than that, the chipset is commendable.

Here we see an nForce4 board with a single PCIe graphics slot.

http://www.i-tech.com.au/products/7872_ ... SB2000.asp

Here is a recent VIA chipset based board with a single PCIe x16 graphics card slot.

http://www.ninjalane.com/display.aspx?d ... page=1#top


Here you'll find a fine example of an nForce3 Ultra chipset based board with AGP graphics.

http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Pr ... XP-939.htm

An article on yet another modern chipset (last page summation):

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard ... gb-25.html

Yes, it is a little confusing but you will need to make a couple of fundamental choices that will narrow your options.

First, you need to choose a SOCKET for your CPU.
The AMD choice is 754 or 939 pin sockets, the 939 being the more powerful (in theory) of the two. I believe the socket 939 will be better supported in the future.

Socket type can drastically affect the feature set of the mainboards, even within the same chipset. For instance, the socket 939 boards support onboard CPU memory controllers, dual channel RAM bus, and higher Front Side Bus speeds than the socket 754 counterparts.

Intel Sockets are not my