Why I have switched to cheap motherboards

I used to build with expensive boards. Every machine I've had with the exception of an old P4 machine I built in 2004 has had a high end motherboard. On C2D I had a P5Q-E, on Nehalem I had a Rampage III Formula. For Sandybridge I had a Maximus IV extreme.

Now with my 4790K Haswell chip, I have an ASRock Z97 anniversary, which cost 1/4 of what my last board cost.

Why such a cheap board?

Well, it has everything I need, and nothing I don't. 6 6Gb/s SATA ports, enough USB, a "good enough" audio implementation (I use a USB DAC anyways) and the NIC is an Intel NIC. It supports 1 GPU which is all I need.

Sure, it only has crummy 4 phase power delivery, but I'm not planning to overclock my 4790K very much, and it has FIVR, so 4 phase should be good for the 4.6Ghz or so I will eventually put on it.

Why did I used to buy expensive boards? Well, I think it was more about bragging rights than anything else. The dip switches and all the I/O and fan headers and the fact that I could tweak from a seperate phone or laptop really turned me on with the Maximus IV, but you know what? In 4 years I never used any of those features. I never needed them.

I thought about it and with the extra $300+ I spent on that board unnecessarily I could have gotten a bigger SSD, or a better GPU, or more RAM, or more hard drive space. Things I would actually use.

At the end of the day, for the average user, a high end board just isn't going to make a meaningful difference.

I have seen people who are using a single GPU, not overclocking, not tweaking, and not using 12 fans use very expensive boards in their builds on forums for years. It's common for first timers to select a high end board.

It's just not necessary. If you are a newbie and you are considering making your first or second build with a high end board that has features you might not need, you should really reconsider. Why buy a Maximus VIII extreme and a 120GB SSD and a GTX 1070 when you could buy a cheap board that will still let you overclock and do most of the things you want. Take that money and put it into a 1080 or a 1TB SSD. Things you will use.

Rant over hehehe!

Makes sense.. Especially with Intel changing sockets so frequently it makes little sense for most users who won't use the features and won't be able to keep the board through generations of cpus that might make it worthwhile to buy a more expensive board.

Thanks for backing me up TD

Funny you should post this.. I havn't replaced my motherboard lately and its not exactly top spec, so just last night i was browsing looking at upgrades.

Im not especially wealthy and just before I hit that 'checkout' button, I stopped and thought "Do I actually need it right now?" (though i may like/want..)

Thing is I can run it with what Ive got and if I wait, the prices of that 8core processor may drop. Reading up on memory, I have enough to play games with what I have - upgrade when needed. Maybe I should just concentrate on my 1TB storage hdd, which is begining to fail...

mistersprinkles, you read my mind..

I've always used fairly cheap mobos, i have receipts going back 15 years and all my mobos have been £100-160. I tried an expensive one once and it clocked much poorer than the £100 cheaper one i had before that one, it had loads of fancy features and extras but i didnt need any of them. In the past a lot of the mobos i used had poor cooling on them, but as long as i added custom heatsinks and water blocks it didnt seem to matter.

I saw a guy building a system recently with a mobo i think it was called godlike summat and it cost more than the CPU he was putting in there, i had to do a double take.

I think the most I paid was £220ish, but that was a bundle with processor and ram, on offer.

I tend to go with a board that has all the features I want and some I might want in the future. I like the quality manufacturers, but not their mad, high-end gaming vanity boards. I've currently got a Asus Z87-Pro that's been rock solid with a silly overclock for a few years, and it didn't cost crazy money for things I don't need.

my rig consists of:

Case: Thermaltake Armor VA8000SWA (in silver, but it matches nothing, so getting sprayed)
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 (clockable, but dont want to push the ram)
Ram: 2x 4gb DDR3 PC3-10700H (was thinking of upping to 16gb, but why?)
Cpu: Amd fx-4100 (yep, 4core, will wait to upgrade)
Vga: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
* Allows me to watch bluray 3d films with my 3dtv
Dvd: Plextor PX-LB950SA - read/write cd/dvd/br
Hdd: 2x 1tb hdd + 1x 2tb hdd

clear liquid cooled with uv blue tubing and red anti-kink. pipe clips uv green..

Yeah, fairly old and low end but it runs well, plays games and 3d bluray disks. the only thing it has trouble with is playing GT4, while emulating the ps2 - minor slow downs, but come on, my temps are still low.. lol.

Theres 3 os's running on it (linux included), Im happy

My existing motherboard is the most expensive I have ever owned (£110). All my other mobo's have been in the £30 - £40 price range.

For me personally I am planning on upgrading right now, i7 6700 skylake at £260 on a £46 Gigabyte with h110 chipset. (£304)
I don't see the point in spending £120+ on a board with SLI, 12 USB 3.0 and 3 PCI-E as I will never ever use it.

All I need is 1 PCI-E x1 for my dual HD tuner card, I'll use the intel onboard gfx and I only need 2 USB 3.0 ports for my Garmin & flash drives.
I'll also never need more than 4 SATA ports and I never overclock these days (used to BITD).

I could buy an i5 6600 and a decent MB for the same price (£304) but as I don't game and only use the comp as a media centre, some video production/encoding and a web browser then the smartest move is to get the best CPU possible.

Obviously, that's subjective though

Oh, believe me, I could keep my mobo and buy a 4.2ghz 8core Amd Fx-8350 for £138 right now (and last night I was sorely tempted, hehe), but I could renew my failing 1tb sata hdd with a Western Digital WD10EURX for £54.40.

Decisions, decisions... lol.

Also with the new Intel CPU's that boost to higher frequencies (depending on what you select), you don't need those high end boards to try and squeeze all that performance out like you used to when overclocking.

High end boards back in those days were about 150-180, but nowadays with the boards being as much as CPU's it's all a way to get more money out of us.

I guess some people will want them for bragging rights, the colour theme/looks or the extras that they have/come with, but you're right, a normal decent board should do you fine. That extra you would have spent on a high end board could be spent elsewhere or saved to buy an even better board a year or two down the line if you decided to upgrade.

moogle said:

High end boards back in those days were about 150-180, but nowadays with the boards being as much as CPU's it's all a way to get more money out of us.

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I guess i could have been buying high end boards, it could also have been down to using AMD from 99-2006/7 when ever core2 took over as the top dog. The last AMD chip i bought was a £600 4800+ and the board for that was only £150. Im guessing nowadays it would be hard to spend £600 on a CPU and get a decent overclocking board for it for £150.

Is reliability an issue any more?

I did go through a stage of repeatedly killing boards especially early AM3 boards.

These days I'm not pushing as hard so I'm using a cheaper board.

components these days are quite reliable. And CPU is actually requiring less power while producing less heat compared to before so motherboards don't have to bare as strong of constraints as before.

Here's a interesting twist on the theme. I built my wife a basic pc using a G3420 and a Gigabyte B85M-D3H, a board that cost me just under £50. It's a nice board and has decent heatsinks but the best part is that it can overclock K series Haswell and Devils Canyon cpu's. It overclocks my 4670k to exactly the same clocks with exactly the same settings as my much more expensive Hero VI. Now I didn't pay anywhere near full price for my board as I got it for just over £120 brand new but if I knew about the wifes Gigabyte before I did my own build then I would have snapped one up instead.

The difference to the op is that her B85M-D3H is sort of a mid range B85 board so has better features than the boards below it. For me it's the same thing with a Z series board. I would never go for the cheapest board I can find. I want a board that gives me options for upgrading later on and has a decent set of features rather than a basic board. The number of times we have seen people on here upgrading to a better board because they bought the cheapest they could find at the time is quite surprising. I would never buy a cheap board with limited features and normally look to spend between £90-120 on a board. As a rule a better board will also have a higher resale value as well.

Holst1981 said:

Is reliability an issue any more?

I did go through a stage of repeatedly killing boards especially early AM3 boards.

These days I'm not pushing as hard so I'm using a cheaper board.

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I think the boards are more reliable now, also the dual bios feature saves a lot of board replacements, i remember going through about 6 nf7-s boards is a year once.

The dual bios feature saves a lot of replacements nowadays also, on GPUs aswell as mobos. Remember when you would have to buy 2 of your favorite board so you could use one for reflashing when you bricked your bios. I remember find a guy who would sell replacement bioses after a few years of overclocking, saved me so much hassel when i was killing my new boards

pastymuncher said:

Here's a interesting twist on the theme. I built my wife a basic pc using a G3420 and a Gigabyte B85M-D3H, a board that cost me just under £50. It's a nice board and has decent heatsinks but the best part is that it can overclock K series Haswell and Devils Canyon cpu's. It overclocks my 4670k to exactly the same clocks with exactly the same settings as my much more expensive Hero VI. N

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I had a cheap AM2 MSI board (K9Neo?) with an Athlon X2 5200, just with the multiplier I could get it from 2.7 to 3.4 rock solid stable on with a stock heatsink and 1GB of cheap Kingston DDR2 400mhz.
I could get to 3.6 and it would BSOD after a couple of hours of Prime, and it would boot at 3.8 but BSOD as soon as starting Prime.
My best ever overclock lol

Most I'd pay for one is about £100. That's expensive for me. Those ones £200 and above are mental imo

paid 165 for mine get what you pay for most of the time