First things first, what do we need to build a desktop computer?
The Motherboard
Brands:
Asus,
EVGA,
Gigabyte and
MSI make excellent mobos.
ASRock is also good. The mobos chosen here are gaming oriented. A different set of HTPC/Office PC oriented mobos is not in this guide.
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| ASUS P7P55D-DELUXE |
AMD+SLI:
The AMD mobos do not natively support SLI. If you intend to SLI nVidia GPUs on an AMD mobo: You can either download some software to enable SLI (with luck), or choose from the following:
MSI NF752-G55,
ASUS M4N75TD, MSI 870A FUZION,
ASUS M4N98TD EVO or
MSI NF980-G65. Please note that most of these mobos use an nForce northbridge chipset.
Warning:
For others components, the price points leave room room for only one or two good reccommendations. Not so for motherboards: At each price point, there at atleast 7 or 8 "good" mobos!
If every "good" mobo were to be added, this guide would become too long, and no longer be helpful. On the other hand, this means some "good" mobos are not included, so take note.
(The mobos reccomended are the better ones out of this large selection. If prices change, this might also change. Yyou may find great comboss that include good mobos not mentioned here.)
Tips:
The plethora of mobos available, and the multitudinous chipsets availabe, make it impossible to give a meaningful discussion of the merits of each in a such a small space.
In short: get the mobo that is compatible with your CPU, has the latest possible chipsets, gives you enough room for future RAM/HDD/GPU upgrades, and if possiblem USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s.
The difference between x16/x16 or x8/x8 us trivial, (2%-3% loss in FPS). It is not recommended to pass over a motherboard because of this. 16x/4x dies make a difference tough (~20% loss).
Next time we'll see what kind of CPU we'll need , and make sure it compatible with our motherboard.
