What should I look for when buying a motherboard?

[Loony BoB]

Honestly system boards are the one area that I've never really paid much attention to over the years and I guess I should. Things I KNOW I need are...

Bare minimum 6x USB ports at the rear of the PC. That'll cover my keyboard, mouse, webcam, mic, charger and headset at the rear. Thankfully a lot of boards manage that much. Obviously a USB connection for the front of my PC, and PCI-E for my graphics card. Four slots for RAM. The correct socket for the CPU. And naturally the layout needs to be viable for my case, drives, etc.

What else is really worth looking for? Are there any specs that affect performance which I need to be wary of? I don't care much for SLi, so probably won't need that but if it's there I won't complain.

Slightly less important: Do brands matter a huge deal? I've had 3-4 Gigabyte boards and loved each of them. Been a long time now though so I don't know if much has changed. Back when I started with Gigabyte Asus were kinda meh (or at least that was the general impression I was given).

 

[Phemo]

Depends on what else you feel you might need. A board with one or two (or more) M.2 slots might be something that matters to some people and form factor (ITX, mATX, ATX) makes a difference too. Chipset can also matter as it can make a difference on things like amount of SATA ports and overclocking - for example, the AMD A320 chipset boards can't overclock while the B350/X370 can. Following on from that, the voltage regulation on some boards is better than others if overclocking is important.

I'm with you on this mostly though - all I really want is a bunch of USBs, a single PCI-E slot, overclock ability, at least 4 SATAs and an M.2 slot. Otherwise I don't really care for things like RGB lighting, wifi etc.

Personally I've gone with Asus for my last few motherboards as I've always found one with the features I want and positive feedback at a decent price. That said, my current gaming box has a Strix Z270I in and it seems to suffer with a cold boot problem as soon as I switch my RAM up to its 3200MHz speed, something that seems to be common across many Asus Z270I boards which I find ridiculous. Z270 excluded, I don't think you can really go wrong with Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock or MSI these days.

 

[Loony BoB]

Thanks massively, was really concerned I was missing something with all these boards. Admittedly Bluetooth would be awesome but that's about all I can think of that I wish I had with my PC that I haven't had in any previous one. I'll have to double check SATA though, forgot I need 5 of those at minimum for my four drives and optical... although I've never seen a board with fewer than 5 so far (at least since IDE stopped being kept around for legacy).