Photograph: Charlie NucciWant to build the perfect PC? The first thing you'll need is a motherboard. If the processor is the brains of your computer, the motherboard is its nervous system: It provides the pathways that allow the processor to talk to the other components. Finding the perfect motherboard means navigating a minefield of technical jargon and marketing buzzwords,
And it can be tricky for even the savviest PC enthusiasts. But with a bit of inside knowledge, you can determine which board is right for you.
Some of the best boards aren't even that expensive. Though our two top picks--Asus's $215 A8N32-SLI Deluxe for AMD chips and its $200 P5N32-SLI Deluxe for Intel CPUs--cost a significant chunk of change, other highly rated models come in at around the $100 mark. Both Asus products provide a great selection of features, one of which is an external SATA port. In addition, they support nVidia's SLI dual-graphics card technology, another performance-friendly feature. But even some less-expensive motherboards, like Gigabyte's $105 GA-K8N Pro-SLI, support dual graphics boards and advanced RAID features.
Photograph: Charlie NucciWe rounded up 14 motherboards and then set the PC World Test Center loose on them, using similarly priced Intel and AMD dual-core processors (a $450 3.2-GHz Pentium D 940 and a $460 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4400+) and fast memory (2GB of Corsair DDR2-667 RAM for the Intel boards and 2GB of DDR400 RAM for the AMD models). Other components of the systems were identical. The Test Center ran our WorldBench 5 test suite and several of the gaming tests we use to assess graphics boards; however, it found few performance differences that we could attribute to the motherboards themselves. The seven boards designed for AMD processors were an insignificant three points apart on WorldBench 5. The $120 Abit AN8 Ultra tied for the highest score, 123, but missed our chart due to poor ratings for design and features. DFI's $169 LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR wasn't very far behind with a score of 120. On the Intel side, the Test Center saw a slightly broader array of WorldBench 5 scores, ranging from 107 for the Intel D975XBX motherboard to 113 for the Gigabyte GA-G1975X board. In tests of 3D game performance, we saw differences of only a few frames per second between systems with the same CPU.
These negligible differences in our performance tests convinced us that performance isn't a compelling factor in choosing among the motherboards in a given category. Instead, you should look for a well-designed board capable of supporting the processor you want while also offering the features and specs you need.
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