How does one shop for a mobo

[trollolo]

SO i know the basics, check for

-size (ATX/micro)
-ram pin count/slots for ram
-socket type (AM3+/1155)
-PCI-E slots

but what else? Are there brands to avoid? What chipsets are there, how do i learn about them? And what price should i be paying to avoid a shoddy one?

 

[paperwastage]

you look at what type of mobo you need(based on socket and chipset)

if you overclock, might want to look for a good stable mobo(with more phase power, heatsinks on key components etc)

like if you are looking for Sandy Bridge consumer (non-Xeon), basically 4 types
- h61
- h67
- p67
- z68

h61 = low frills. usually no SATA6 or usb 3.0.
h67 = h61 + whatever is missing above
p67 = h67 plus overclocking minus IGP
z68 = h67 + p67 (overclocking with IGP with SSD cach)

brands to avoid: people just have a preference with a brand or not... mostly the same...

price: Intel, <$75 is low budget, $100 is decent, >$150 is more
AMD, i'd say subtract $25 from the above estimates

 

[BonzaiDuck]

In the "old days" (1995 thru 2002) when I was just "building my own" PCs, I'd pick modestly-priced Intel motherboards, slap the systems together with no thought about over-clocking or anything else except that the computer "worked." I'm even ashamed to say that I didn't even test the memory, so I was fortunate that I never had issues of things not working to spec right out of the shrink-wrap.

Since around 2003, I spent time shopping for "the right parts" and that includes the motherboard and PSU especially.

The fortunes of mobo makers rise and fall with each generation of processor.

So -- for a particular chipset or assortment of chipsets -- I start looking for performance reviews for established mobo-makers and models. I place a premium on "comparison reviews," but I examine everything I can find. I may settle on a particular chipset, and continue looking among different manufacture and model alternatives.

I also look at a board's BIOS history, more often striving to defer my project until there are enough forum posts and reviews by "guinea pigs" to indicate the sort of bugs I'll encounter, and whether the BIOS and board-revision has "matured" so that I might avoid the miseries of others.

But that behavior is exclusively risk-averse. Sometimes, I take a walk on the wild side -- a gamble. This time, I gambled that the Z68 chipset and the initial releases of of Z68 boards was an exception to the "maturity" profile, since it was based on the P67 and H67(?) chipsets -- a sort of hybrid.

I gambled . . . and I feel as though I won . . .