What to look for in a mobo?

[jellydoughnut217]

im not too familiar with mobos so i need to know what to look for in a mobo, i know it has to have the same socket as the processor, and enough pci and pci-e slots to accomadate my needs, but is there anything else i should be looking for?

 

[Asus]

Personally I don't buy the newest thing out on the market. I wait and see the feedback after at least a month.

Layout of the board generally is something that is overlooked. How easy it is to setup and if your fan wires, ATX power connectors and how other things will reach or fit. If you would ever want to put a bigger heatsink/fan on then make sure the capacitors are not really close to the socket and it has the mount holes for heatsinks.

Otherwise I look if it has passive cooling or a fan on the chipset. Some ppl don't like the whiny noise that small fans make. Asus and Abit have started using heatpipe cooling on the chipset for some boards which is nice. The capacitors and other parts up by the CPU get pretty hot and some of the fancy boards have vents or cooling there (Abit comes to mind).

Maybe check what audio chip it uses for onboard quality/CPU usage. If you care about SATA/RAID options then check what chips it uses for them. Example nForce4 can support up to 4 ports but some boards use a different chip to handle 2 of those ports.

Feedback is one of the biggest factors though. Like everyone raves about the DFI board but if you really get into the forums and look at what people say they also say there are some issues with compatibility and also layout could be better etc. Lot of people liked the Asus board over the DFI even though it didn't have quite as many OCing options but because the layout was right on and setup was a breeze.

 

[ComradeBadger]

I quite like the Abit's 3rd Eye features and general troubleshooting help (this is especially true of their lower-end boards.. [socket a] .. Asus's X boards on the few occasions we've had problems with the mobos, we've had to scrap them ;( )