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