'k, straight to the point: Im trying to build a tower from scratch. When buying motherboards, what should u look out for? they all look acceptable to me, but from the range of prices I'm guessing theres a lot more to it. what makes the difference? ps.is a high bus speed necessary for different quality cpu's?
The prices deltas between motherboards boil down to four things: 1. Chipset 2. Onboard features 3. Extra goodies 4. Intangibles For example, for SocketA, there's the Abit NF7-S2G and the DFI LANPARTY nForce2 Ultra. Both use the nForce2-Ultra400 chipset, which is the premium chipset for SocketA motherboards, but (at Newegg.com) the DFI costs $50 more than the Abit. Why? Well, looking at what's on the board itself, the DFI has both a gigabit ethernet controller in addition to a 10/100 ethernet controller, while the Abit only has the gigabit. The DFI has 3 Firewire ports, Abit has none. DFI has two more USB 2.0 and SerialATA ports than the Abit as well. With extra goodies, the DFI has the Abit beat easily. Besides the typical ATA cables, rear USB cables, I/O shield, driver CD and manual (which the Abit comes with), the DFI also comes with a carrying case for your computer, a FrontX 5.25" bay with several connectors, and a video editor. Finally, there's the intangibles. Both boards have been heralded as being the most overclocker-friendly boards for SocketA chips, but the DFI has the right combination of BIOS and memory controller tweaks to make it the most overclockable SocketA board. However, despite all of the advantages that the DFI board has, which seem to be at a a steal at only $50 more than the Abit, the Abit is still the better board because the DFI has given a lot of people nothing but grief trying to get the boards to even boot up properly, let alone do anything with all of that cool stuff. The Abit is rock-solid through and through. Yes, this is probably more than you wanted to know, but it's still good to know.
yay! comprende mucho. many thanks, its actually exactly what i needed to know, tho making sense of some of it is a bit like trnaslating a foreign language, newbie-ish though that is. thankyou for the help.
