What do you spend on a motherboard?

Personally I don't like spending more then £100 on a motherboard

My average is around £50 though

Unless you're an uber extreme overclocker I dont see who you need to spend more ... I can get a great overclock out of mine

Thats my 10 cents anyway

i go for the more mid range sort of board, while i don't need all bells and whistles of a top end board i do like something a bit decent, my last board was a toss up between a asus p5k premium and the p5e and with only £10 difference i chose the x38 because it had everything i needed and with it having pci2.0 would give me a bit more use an the long run, so back to the original question i spent £130,and is my most expensive board yet

The last few 'main rig' motherboards i've built have been mid end AMD so ~£100 can't really see the need on going over that on nForce boards, are Intel based boards more expensive for the same (broad) feature set?

*

My motherboards have been around £130-150 for as long as I can remember, but that's not to say that I wouldn't be interested in a review of a board that was under £50 or over £200.

The cheap ones are nice to know about for rigs other than the main system, and if a £220 board was really phenomenal as compared to a £130 one I would consider buying it.

Around the 'just over £100 mark' just lately. I'd have to have a deep and meaningful think about buying one that was over £130.

Around £100-130. The P5B Deluxe I have cost me £130 new. Generally, people don't upgrade the mobo as much as they would add in RAM, upgrade a GFX or a CPU, so it makes sense to spend a little more on one at the start.

"If" i were to build the rig i'm thinking of it be under £100 as i'm keeping costs down. But may think of spending more if i thought it make a good platform to work with in the future.

the last mobo I bought was my A8N-SLi Deluxe, £130 region.(when it was the first 939 board) which I personally think is to much.

my next board is definitely going to be more round the £50-£80 region.

Then, who bought Striker Extreme's for £200+?

I look for boards (all 2 that I have bought) around £90-120, but more importantly with the features that I need, which would vary between people. For example, I have just been looking for a p35 board, but I knew I needed a PCI-E 16 and a 4 which ruled out a lot of the cheaper ones.

wasnt me who bought the striker's for 200£+:)

the gigabyte p35 one was like 75£, the abit x38 one i've just recently bought was around 150£

I usually spend anything from £85 - £150 on a mobo, depending on what features it has.
But I've paid £180/£185 for a couple of boards in the past too... so I suppose paying £220 wouldn't be totally out of the question?
But it would need to be something special at that price!

£80 to £120.

I only ever purchased 4 motherboards for myself (hundreds for other people)

The motherboards have been -

Abit KT7A-Raid (£75)

Abit NF7-S (£80)

MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (£85)

Asus A8R32-MVP (£120) (currently using with Opty 165 @ 3.0Ghz & 8800GTS 512Mb)

I spent £90 on the p5ne-sli in my current rig (first self build) but would probably spend between £100-£150 on my next builld just to get a few extra features. The top flight boards although having some nice features are compleate overkill IMHO

i would expect to pay at least 80$ - but not more than the processor (currently what? 170$ for a x6400 BE?)

what that in pounds? 80.00 USD = 40.3517 GBP

170.00 USD = 85.7914 GBP

so 40 to 86 ?

I try to keep my motherboards less than $200.

Like everyone else here, I tend to stick around the £100 mark.

I think you get diminishing returns for your money on anything over that, and I certainly wouldn't pay over £200 for a mobo.

The lower end of £80 - £120 here. You can get a very good, solid motherboard without wasting money. Beyond £120 is a rip-off as far as I'm concerned.

Last couple of motherboards:

Asus A7V333 ~ £70
Abit NF7-S ~ £80
DFI nF4 Ultra-D ~ £90

Personally i try to keep mobo purchases below the £150 mark if posible, however last board (680i asus) was £160, am happy to strech that bit further if it offers enough for the money at the time.

Up to $150.

The last motherboard I bought (excluding LGA 775 for customers) was an Asus A8V for myself.

I'm someone who has a problem with my motherboard costing more than my processor.

What it takes to achieve my ends. Right now I'm SERIOUSLY considering abandoning single socket because I'm doing so much more rendering. My OCed E6600 is still taking all night.

However, until the ASUS with crossfire comes out, I'm just kinda waiting, between it and a Phenom setup. I still have this golden 3500+ that'll run 3GHz on air... It'll tide me over until B3.

I try to spend between $100 and $150. Even for O/Cing there are always great boards in that range. Also I don't need 8 SATA ports and 16 USB's and on and on. Also I'm not keen on the "high tech" heatpipe chipset cooling on the high end boards. They are great for plug'n'play but not so good if you want to mod or upgrade cooling, then the whole thing comes off and your $$$ is wasted.

The extra $$$ is better spent on video or CPU or cooling or....

i go for between £80-120 personally, though like many, my last was a 680i which was a little more...

RwD

I put £161-£22 but i would be prepared to spend over that as long as I'm getting something worth the money!

I guess I paid around 200 € for the current mobo.. And so did I of the one before the current. So 120-160£ I guess. I think I'm hooked to quality when ever I can afford it. Even when I really don't "need" all the features. 2 mobos during 4 years isn't that many though...

I usually spend no more than £100 on a mobo, but you shouldn't stop reviewing the top end boards. Remember, todays top end tech is tomorrows budget tech.

Originally Posted by TheoGeo
I usually spend no more than £100 on a mobo, but you shouldn't stop reviewing the top end boards. Remember, todays top end tech is tomorrows budget tech.

+1 for that. Seriusly you need more mobo reviews in the £81-120 class. Not everyone wanna waste money on the cutting egde when they just want something fairly new and well performing.

My current MN2-E is a great board although I'm planing of spending around £70-100 on my next one.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Then, who bought Striker Extreme's for £200+?

Who said they were Strikers? (£221 + range guilty here)

Originally Posted by KayinBlack
What it takes to achieve my ends. Right now I'm SERIOUSLY considering abandoning single socket because I'm doing so much more rendering. My OCed E6600 is still taking all night.

Do it! You can get bargains on all sorts of SMP rigs and barebones, especially now that Seaburg has come out. Series 5300 Xeons should be found for 'cheap'.

I personally don't spend a lot of money on motherboards, but I would still like to see some high-end board reviews - it gives me an idea of how good the "best of the best" is, and how well a chipset performs in optimal conditions.

I honestly don't know what your extra money gets you with a higher-end board, I've always had great performance from £50-80 boards. But, they're pretty boring to review. Comparitive summaries or references like Tom's Hardware CPU charts are handy, but I wouldn't have time to read loads of mid-range board reviews.
A 'Best Of' summary of budget boards would be the most useful thing, I suppose.

I spent $300 on my Abit IN9 32x-MAX but I got $100 back in a rebate.... Seriously looking at the Striker II now.

80-120 here, although I'm not opposed to spending more if its worth it. Also I don't see why people want so many SATA ports on the motherboard, I would prefer an x8 speed PCI-E for a hardware RAID card.

I'm a stingy *******, so I tend to shoot for the range of $80 to $120. I'm hard pressed to find good reason to spend any more than that on a motherboard, when all I want it to do is provide the connectivity for the few parts I'm actually planning to use on it.

My last few boards have fell in the 160 to 220 category, i think its worth investing in a good motherboard, especially with the clockability of the new core2 processors. Just ensures a better clock and a bit more stability.

If it's over £100 I won't buy it, I think I average at about £70 or so.

60-90

Personally I wouldn't spend more than £120 (although I accidentially clicked on the £121-160 option!) However, realistically it would be between £80-£100 ideally. There are so many well featured boards at that price that I would consider paying anything substantially more for what amounts to marginal improvements imo.

I've spent up to £80 in the past but on my latest PC all I wanted was a motherboard without a fan. After the fan on my last board started making a buzzing noise I took it off and noticed no problems. It only cost about £46 :)

£80-£90 ish typically but depends on the feature set & reviews, would happily spring £120-£140 for the PERFECT board.

But also had some cracking boards at £30-£40 (older stuff admitadly)

I've only bought one motherboard before and at the time that was probably the best one around, the Asus A8N-SLI premium. I think it was about £120.

In hindsight it was a complete waste of money, the main reason I bought it was for the heatpipe cooling solution as it was silent, not much point to that seeing as my other fans are pretty noisy. The other reason was that I could upgrade to SLI in the future if I needed to, my graphics card is chugging a bit now, but I still haven't gotten a second one, and if I did want to upgrade I'd get a DX10 one anyway.

I'm definitely more interested in the £50 area. You seem to get all the features you really need, but you don't pay though the ear for features that sound cool on the box but end up never being used. If money was no object I'd go for the expensive stuff, but next time I'm gonna go with something a bit more affordable so I can afford to get better parts in other areas.

i spent ages researching a motherboard that would support 1066 ram and have sli, i found an asus one (£70) but that was DOA, that put me off asus so i went straight back to gigabyte (£100) and sacrificed the SLI, since having it was a "just incase i do get another g card". i love gigabyte ive had about 4 boards and none have let me down. the more features the better for me, sine i like having things i probably wont use.

I always try to keep around the £100 mark. Otherwise things spiral out of control in spending :P

200 here, but then ive burnt about 6 grand on my machine

I had the Striker Extreme, didn´t work,
changed to a P5B-E Plus, worked for 2 days
Got sick and tired of the asus 680i SLI bords and changed to a Giganyte X38-DQ6 wich works like a charm and I´m verry happy with it, and it´s colorfull to :)
So I´m in the 161-220+ rage with this rig.

i spent around NZ$100 for mine, i got an Asus M2NE-Sli. I haven't had any problems with any asus ones i've had before, the only problem i'm having at the moment is that i need more pci slots

I don't normally spend more than £60, and normally the most important thing for me is reliability. Things chagnge when your a student.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Then, who bought Striker Extreme's for £200+?

Hum, you found me.
My EVGA 680i cost me £210, and my Striker £150, but that was a year after buying the EVGA.
While having all features including the kitchen sink are nice, i also like build quality/customer support etc, 2 things i get from Asus, had the striker been cheaper when i bought the EVGA, i would have bought it then, but it is, i can't fault the EVGA at all.

Sam

Still got my P5B vanilla here (£35 at the time :)), clocks brilliantly and has all the features I need, would have considered getting a P5BDelux (£80 at the time) but at the time it was twice the price. I'd now probably move to a P35 board, but they'll really have to offer something over the P5B...

While I'm on the subject if anybody is gettign rid of a P5B Delux I'd be interested...

spend 130 on Abit iP35 Pro, and currently looking to spend around 150 on a board with similar feature, but less Vdroop with quads, and PCIe2.0 native support.

i personally think it's good to review the main stream ones more, and review a few top boards just for reference.

I'm very happy with my GA-x38-DQ6 which was in the £150 mark.

Previous boards have generally been on the pricey side as well. (Asus P5B-E Plus, A-bit AN8-Ultra, A-Bit AN8, A-Bit NF7-S v2.0, A-Bit NF7-S v1.1, 2 other A-Bits and a *cough* PC Chips) - i don't think I've missed anything there...

I would spend £200 happily on a board. Last upgrade i was looking at the stiker extreme for in excess of £200, i ended up buying the p5n-e-sli at about £160 as people raged about the striker eating up memory and costing them lots, whilst i was willing to spend the money, i'm not made of money and didnt want to have to buy new sticks of ram too. I'll put my hands up and say i like to buy at the top end of the mobo market.

peace

last board i bought was the 650i ultra - cost around 65 - it did everything i needed it to, so i didn't see the point in spending more for features that i would rarely use!

but if there was a really good board or if i decided to go sli, i would def spend the money on it

My first board was the awesome £100 A8N-Sli Deluxe, and when that came out, I thought £100 was expensive!

Having said that, I'm now running a board that cost me just £28.

EVGA 680i - cost around 150ish when i bought it, cant quite remember, would pay more, up to £200, for something real special, anything over that is excess

I wouldnt spend more than £150

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
high end boards are nice (like the Striker II today), but if no one is really interested then we might as well concentrate on another area.

I don't think it's a question of whether I'm interested... I always find it interesting to see what high end stuff is just coming onto the market. It has much more to do with the size of my Wallet. I like my computers to work for me for as long as possible before they are too outdated, and go for the best parts (including motherboards) that my budget allows, but realistically I am unlikely to ever justify spending over about £120 on a motherboard, unless it had some truly brilliant features. My current system is a few years old now, but the Asus socket 939 board at the heart of it has run flawlessly, and cost around £60.

I'm looking to upgrade my PC soon ... I still have an AGP board .. I know, I know ;)
.. when I did my build in early 2005, I got a higher end board with lots of features that I found I have not used (AOpen AX4SPE Max II - $150)
.. I think this time that I'll try to reign myself in and get a slightly less featured one, but we'll see :)

Please still review the top end boards along with the midrange, because as has been pointed out, they give us a benchmark to compare the midrange boards to

The last four I've put in have all been Foxcoon C51XEM2AAs, mainly because I'm building video edit stations and the onboard raid goes like it's jet-propelled. Downside: they're not amazingly cheap and the onboard audio is noisy. I got the first one effectively for free as part of a magazine review and realised how good they are.

Unfortunately, with AMD seemingly unable to come up with a half-decent quad core processor, I will probably be moving to Intel next time. Shame. Never built an Intel box before.

I just bought the components for my new sys last week after I got my tax return:
Asus Maximus Formula @ $US 260
Q6600 @ $US 265
8800GT 512 @ $US 250
OCZ 2GB Reaper @ $US 100

Basically, I thought long and hard about this build. I thought about a budget sys with a 630i and the new e8400 and maybe an 8600GTS, but it all came down to starting a cycle. I wanted something that would last well until Nehelem, without wishing I had something better in six months, and I could start an upgrade cycle ever two years. A budget sys just requires too much compromise. Generally, I barely pay rent and keep the fridge half full, but I really wanted this, so I just made it happen.

I think Bit-tech should focus more on mid to high end, with extreme coverage sprinkled in between for color and zaz, lol. I would consider my sys to be high end, extreme would be QX9650 on Asus Maximus Extreme with ddr3 2000 and Crossfire ATI cards. Those are fun to look at, but the performance gap between a 1000$ sys and a 3000$ sys is not worth the price gap in my opinion, and only the single web-programmer in his mom's basement paying no rent can afford it anyway.

I would never buy a mobo more expensive than the cpu, and I would never buy a cpu more than 500$. That said, I hope they continue to cram more features into mobo's that used to be on add-on cards like HD sound, hdmi w/onboard graphics capable of h264 decode, wifi, bluetooth, maybe even ATSC/qam tuner in the future? SAS controller? For a truly feature-packed mobo, I'd pay whatever it was worth if I can come up with the money (worth-- meaning I won't pay $$$ for a super special lime green edition with extra floppy cables or some such, the extra money must provide an equivalent extra feature set).

btw, after my current build, I have no food in the fridge and will likely be living off Ramen noodles for the next month. :(
But my new sys is worth it!

LoL i paid £35 for a motherboard and had rock solid performance even on crysis

I would usualy spend between 120-200 quid. But looking at that chart i hope that you dont go to reviewing the budget boards and miss out on more of the enthusiast boards. After all, i thought these websites where for enthusiasts! lol.

Just relised my sig was out of date. But that has brought another thign to my attenchen.

I think that you should do reviews comparing boards and point out some have many issues. i see you have good reviews of the 680i boards but in realitiy they seem to be riddled with problems.

The only computer I built used a $100 (I think someone said £80, which sounds right considering when I bought it the dollar didn't suck quite so hard) NF7-S. IIRC, it was just about the best money could buy, aside from some really unstable gaming boards.

My desktop is running on a Asus A7n8x Deluxe which, in it's time was the top board around and cost in the region of 120 pounds. The reason i went for the best (and most expensive) i could get my hands on was that i knew that i would be using it for quite a long time due to leaving work for university and it has lasted be very very well. I would definitely be thinking of another very high end board as my next one for the same sort of reason.

I used to enjoy being a PC enthusiast in the sense that I would get the ultimate parts, but ever since the AMD64 generation and the X2's, it has become a lot harder to keep up with the absolute top end compared to the early days. A top end PC 5 years back would cost you $3000 USD, including a good monitor and etc - now you can expect to pay at least double!

Anyway, before I go further off topic, I only spend less than a hundred UK pounds on a motherboard now. I think the need for some crazy features just make it unnecessary for me, as a university student. Sure, I'd like a C2D and an 8800GTS in my system, but having capabilities for SLi and tons of other parts means that getting said parts will further push my PC budget to sky high amounts. Not an option for now :(

My new DFI LP 680i board was $260 (131GBP) the DFI LP 925X I had before that was $195 (99GBP) so on average $228 (115GBP)

I spent $75 US on my P5B-Plus, which is about 39GBP, I have spent $90/45GBP on a different motherboard a while back, a higher end 945P board. The rest of the motherboards I've had, I've got used from friends.

Been mostly buying used Mobo's when people by the next new technology and try to get a bargain. My Giga 81955x cost about £40 (running D940 @ 4.0Ghz) and a Giga 965-DS3 for about £50 (running a E6600 @ 3.2Ghz). As people jump on the newer tech, looking to buy a P35 board for about £50 and getting a E8400 ;-) Cheers

My IP35 Pro was 160 bucks when it was brand new and worth every penny. I generally won't spend more then that on a motherboard. I've spent up to 500 dollars on one of my past motherboards, but that was WAY back when the Tyan Thunder K7 came out and dual CPU AMD was a new concept. Other then huge revolutionary jumps like that, never again.

my last board cost £12 off ebay the most expensive I have ever bought was £27 (ABIT NF7) off all my boards the cheapest have been the longest lasting. My Asus has power problems (can't cold boot) and my abit just died on me.

I do have a shuttle SN45G which cost £120 i think new which I could count as my most expensive mobo ever. but that also included a very good case and power supply and cooling fan.

anywhere between £40 and £160. But i prefer to stick sub £120

My last mobo cost @60 & was a bit behind the 'cooking' boards overall according to Toms Hardware. On the plus side, it's really stable & runs cool. Performance boards are often prone to overheat & can be tricky to set up, plus sometimes you come across weird incompatibilities that take an age to sort, which is less time for gaming. I'd rather go with a cheap, safe board so I have more time to play games.

I am using a $46usd MB in my main system, granted its mATX, it has everything I need, a nice audio chipset, gb lan, a PCIE 16x slot, 4 sata headers, ect, ect...

I would say I buy MB's from $40-140 USD.

I dont even look at boards much higher than $160 USD.

I bought an Epox board that Bit did a review on a long time ago, it was the only SLI socket 754 board out there. I think I paid around $80 USD.

Another vote for mid-range boards here. My concern when buying motherboards is mostly stability and longevity - it's the backbone of the system, so I'd rather make it very stable and get my performance out of the CPU, RAM, and video card. So that rules out both the cheap boards and the 'enthusiast' boards for me.

That said, I'd like to see a wide variety of boards reviewed here, from run-of-the-mill to specialty items. It's always good to see what's happening in the industry, even if I'm not going to purchase most of it. Who knows, some of the features may show up in my next mid-range purchase.

going for the USD-GBP conversion (2-1) my most expensive board has been about 98GBP

Originally Posted by oasked
The lower end of £80 - £120 here. You can get a very good, solid motherboard without wasting money. Beyond £120 is a rip-off as far as I'm concerned.

What he said.
I always follow good reviews, and look for stability and fair performance.
Generally a board that costs twice as much isn't twice as good in the day to day tasks we all do. And you only tend to spend all that extra money on things you don't really need. (Or at least, I never do!)

I think mine was around £110, hard to tell exactly as it was a CPU + mobo + RAM bundle

usually spent around £80 in the past.

I went for the slightly more expensive board for a few things: passive cooling heatpipe thing, dual onboard gigabit, onboard WiFi, and plenty (6) SATA ports

Last point is kinda moot, as a few months later i went and brought a PCIe x4 raid card

I am willing to spend up to 160 for a good motherboard.

i would spend as much as it takes to get the best mobo ...... but it would be nice if more emphasis was given to amd , instead of the Intel this Intel that . some of us have not given up on amd ...... (yet)

Originally Posted by cyrilthefish
I think mine was around £110, hard to tell exactly as it was a CPU + mobo + RAM bundle

usually spent around £80 in the past.

I went for the slightly more expensive board for a few things: passive cooling heatpipe thing, dual onboard gigabit, onboard WiFi, and plenty (6) SATA ports

Last point is kinda moot, as a few months later i went and brought a PCIe x4 raid card

What RAID card are you using? How does it perform?

Originally Posted by r4tch3t
What RAID card are you using? How does it perform?

It's this card (price gone up a bit since i got it though :( )

http://chiyochan.net/temp/rocketraid_sm.jpg
Compared drive is a single 500GB drive... though it's a seagate .9 whilst the array has .10 drives in it, not sure how relevant that is

Seems very nice so far, better driver support and stability compared to the onboard nvidia raid i was using, and also i don't have to worry about a drive dying whilst not loosing much space to redundancy :)

Definately worth the money so far.

Only problem i do have though is not having any HDD activity lights... i'll sort that out when i'm next near a Maplins :)

Excellent, I am planning on getting the 2320 at some point. Although I hope I can get it cheaper as the cheapest here is $619NZD or about 240 quid. Its £190 on Scan, hmm, how much do you think international shipping would be? And how to get around customs?
Best thing is, I will be upgrading soon and will have a spare mobo with a x4 slot on it :D
The motherboard was $300 (£120) when I bought it.

the one im going to get after I return/sell the one I have now will be $235. the one i have now was $170. so im going for a more expensive one. but with the more expensive one it has newer tech so upgrading the mobo wont have to happen as soon.

the motherboard i want to buy (soon) is the ip35 which converted is 138 pounds but thats a bit much for me so im more likly to go with the gigiabyte p35 ds3r which converted is 83 pounds

I just recently bought a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L for around $100, and I can't even begin to imagine what I would gain from a more expensive board. This thing is absolutely flawless - no corners have been cut, it has overclocking potential, non-electrolytic capacitors, high-quality onboard audio, gigabit LAN, 1333 FSB and 1033 RAM support. The only thing missing is dual PCIe, if that's important to you. I suppose I can see a few advantages to the pricier DS3R in some situations, with more SATA and