Difference between gaming and normal motherboards?

Shui Mo Qing Hua · 21 Jul 2017 at 12:48

I'm looking at the buying a motherboard for my gaming pc and I encountered two choices below:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...1151-ddr4-mini-itx-motherboard-mb-54u-gi.html

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...1151-ddr4-mini-itx-motherboard-mb-55f-gi.html

To me after reading the specs it seems like the normal motherboard has more features and it's cheaper. So what justifies the higher price of the gaming motherboard?

pastymuncher · 21 Jul 2017 at 13:01

The gaming has RGB and less connectivity by the looks of it. I would get the Z270N wifi if I had to pick from those two as it's cheaper and has no RGB (not a fan of them). You can see a side by side comparison here.

Shui Mo Qing Hua · 21 Jul 2017 at 13:07

pastymuncher said:
The gaming has RGB and less connectivity by the looks of it. I would get the Z270N wifi if I had to pick from those two as it's cheaper and has no RGB (not a fan of them). You can see a side by side comparison here.

Ah what is RGB? Are those not the primary colours?

pastymuncher · 21 Jul 2017 at 18:50

Crappy led lighting. You can see it in the pictures.

Bickaxe · 23 Jul 2017 at 08:27

RGB (LEDs that can change colour) motherboards are pointless if you do not have a windowed case or want to show it off. I would guess that the positioning of them would result in them being obscured by cooler and gpu anyway. They work better with custom loops as people tend to theme their builds.
I would go with the first option.

Flake87 · 23 Jul 2017 at 08:53

The thing which stands out to me is that the 'gaming' motherboard has USB 3.1 the other only has USB 3.0 Now I don't know how long you plan on owning this before replacement, but 3.1 is the future and more peripherals are going to be going this way even though there aren't that many at the moment.
I got caught out by the change from USB 2 to 3 and it's technology in a lot of cases which can't be upgraded.

On this board it looks like you are stuck with a single PCI slot so you wouldn't be able to add a card in the future either

Just to make this a little more complicated it seems like the cheaper board is obsolete and has been replaced with the revision 1.0 board which DOES have USB 3.1, and if I was doing a build I wouldn't want to be buying the last generation

http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-Z270N-WIFI-rev-10#kf

pastymuncher · 23 Jul 2017 at 13:02

Revision 1 is the launch version of the board and as far as I can remember Gigabyte has always done things this way so it hasn't been updated at all. It clearly shows in OCUK's description plus the side by side comparison that I linked to that the cheaper board has 6x USB 3.1 ports plus a Type C port and a pair of USB 2.0/1.1 ports. Most, if not all ITX boards only have a single pci-e slot because there is simply no space to add any more.