Working With the Boards
Photograph: Charlie NucciEven the most full-featured motherboard won't do you any good if it's a pain to set up and work with. Most of the boards we looked at offer clean design and easy access to their ports and sockets. But the more feature-packed models can get a bit crowded. For example, on the Asus P5N32-SLI and the nonranking ECS PA1-MVP, some of the SATA ports are right behind one of the PCI Express x16 slots. If you install a large graphics card, it may obstruct one or more of those drive connections. On the Asus, that becomes a problem only if you plan to use two graphics cards (if you're using a single graphics card, you should insert it into the primary PCI Express x16 slot, at a distance away from the SATA ports); but on the ECS, the primary PCI Express x16 slot lines up with the SATA ports. Two other SATA ports remain unimpeded, but it is still an uninspired design.
In another odd layout decision, ECS put one of the PA1-MVP's chip-set components onto a large daughterboard that plugs into a proprietary slot that's nearly as wide as the motherboard. The card is large enough to impede airflow over the motherboard and leaves space for just one PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots--significantly fewer than on many boards.
Carefully consider layout and design concerns like these when you shop (most vendors and online stores like NewEgg offer detailed images of the products).
And since a properly cooled system is a stable system, you should pay attention to cooling as well. Many of the boards add a fan to cool the chip set, but some take different approaches. The Asus and Abit motherboards use heat pipes--metal tubes filled with liquid that conduct the heat away. The Abit boards go a step further and put the heat sink in the back panel. That type of cooling helps you build a quiet PC, but it doesn't obviate the need for fans completely. Placing these heat sinks near the processor does mean that they can make use of the flow of air over the CPU, however.
The Gigabyte GA-G9175X mounts four small but noisy fans in plastic ducts to direct hot air from the processor and the chip set out of the case. The ECS PA1-MVP uses a similar design, with a small fan and a plastic duct directing air out the back panel. It's quieter than the Gigabyte's fans, but still adds some noise.
If your system has cooling to spare, you can try overclocking the CPU to gain a little extra speed. All of the boards we tested offer overclocking features. Most reside in the PC Setup program, which you can enter before the OS boots, and several motherboards (from Abit, Asus, and ECS) include screens in Setup that supply easy access to all of these settings at once. The ECS boards also let you create four alternative settings that you can select with a press of a key at boot--very useful if you have different configurations for different tasks. The Abit boards provide the easiest overall overclocking experience: Their Guru software can even overclock the processor automatically, increasing the speed gradually to determine how far it can safely go.
Each motherboard we tried has at least four USB 2.0 ports on its back panel; but for connecting lots of devices, the Abit AW8-Max is a good bet. It has six USB 2.0 ports on the back, plus another two on an included PCI slot cover. The motherboards all supply "headers" that can connect to USB or FireWire ports built into your PC case.
All of the boards also come with gigabit ethernet adapters, for connecting to a network and to the Internet. And the Abit, Asus, DFI, ECS, and Foxconn motherboards all include a second ethernet adapter, which can be useful for running two separate networks (one for transferring files and another for Internet connections, say).
The trick to selecting a motherboard is to decide which features you want. Asus's A8R-MVP is a smart pick for a simple AMD system: It's inexpensive and its features will satisfy most users' needs. For a basic Intel PC, the EVGA nForce 4-SLI Intel (not on the chart) is a good choice, though it lacks a FireWire connection and other extras. Our Best Buys, Asus's A8N32-SLI Deluxe and P5N32-SLI Deluxe, are great for AMD and Intel power users. Both offer plenty of expansion and overclocking options that make building a high-performance system easy.
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