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 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.
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 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
