Things you should think about when choosing the best motherboard for your 'homemade' pc
What's Your Processor?
First and most important thing to consider when buying your motherboard - what CPU or processor are you using? Motherboards are made differently, not all motherboards will support all CPUs. What CPU you select will determine the type of motherboard you get.
For example, if you want to use an Intel Pentium 4 CPU, the motherboard you select must be able to support that brand and model of CPU. The motherboards are also designed to support specific speeds for a CPU, so make sure it can support the speed of the processor as well. Another example is, an 939 socket AMD CPU would not work with a P4 socket 775 board.
What FSB can it support?
FSB or front side bus, is how fast the cpu can talk with the motherboard. if your cpu has an fsb of 2000mhz and the motherboard only has 800mhz, the cpu will not operate at full speed, as the motherboard can not take the info that fast.
What kind of video cards does it support?
There are two major kinds of video cards these days, APG, and the more popular PCI-e (pci express). The PCI-e cards are much faster 16x connection where as the apg is only 8x. If you plan to cross-fire or SLI two cards, you will need a board that has two PCI-e slots.
Expansion slots.
Do you plan to add a sound card, extra usb or any other type of pci card? make sure the motherboard has enough expansion slots for pci for your needs.
Sound?
Do you want to use onboard sound, such as the common Realtek ALC chipset. These can be fine for most users, but music lovers and game players will more than likely want to add there own 5.1 3D surround sound cards.
Memory?
Who much and what kind do you want to use? most newer highend boards have 4 ram slots, some will have three and some will have only 2. the more slots, the more memory you can have, 4 slots means upto 4gigs, 2 slots means upto only 2 gigs. also, what type does it support, is it ddr or ddr2. ddr2 has much faster clock speads, upto 1000mhz, while ddr only goes upto 400mhz.
SATA? RAID?
Do you plan on using a SATA drive, then your board will need to have a sata connector on the board, also your power supply will need to be sata ready if you plan to use a raid array for multiple drives. you can still use eide drives with a sata board, but sata is much faster. also, most newer boards are supporting sata-II, or sata-300, plain sata is sata-150.
Most all new boards these days also have onboard LAN and USB 2.0 with firewire, so you should not need to worry about those.
Happy MOBO hunting!
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