Tutorial Tech

Once you know what form factor you are going to use you must make sure that the motherboard you are going to use supports the bus speed of your processor or higher. For instance, if you were buying an Intel Pentium 4 processor with a 533MHz bus it doesn’t make sense to buy a motherboard that only supports a max bus speed of 400MHz.

The reliability of motherboard as measured by return rates is roughly correlated with the price you pay. As a rule of thumb: the higher the price the better the reliability. We suspect that the manufacturers who have higher profit margins do more extensive testing and quality control before shipping. Therefore, we suggest that you buy a motherboard of the highest price your budget can afford. It is not easy to replace a motherboard, even for professional technicians. Besides, if the motherboard is bad, your whole system is likely to be in jeopardy.

On the other hand, motherboards do not have any moving, consumable parts. If they go bad, most often they do so within a month. If you can take your chances and are willing to learn how to replace a motherboard, the less expensive motherboards are just fine for budget minded buyers.

Buy current but proven technology. Purchasing yesterday’s technology can mean greater difficulty or limitation in future upgrades. For example, it doesn’t make sense to buy a Socket 478 motherboard anymore, since Intel stopped making Socket 478 processors when they reached the 2.4GHz speed. Socket 478 processors are now starting to become rare and their performance is lacking compare to newer Socket LGA 775 versions.

WARNING: Changing a motherboard from one type to another with different BIOS/chipset usually requires reinstallation of your operating system, particularly under Windows 9x. This happens because Windows 9x is designed to be “smart” enough to recognize some hardware; however, once it is set you can’t change it easily. This can be an upgrade nightmare if you are not prepared for it. Be prepared to do a full operating system install/re-install when you change a motherboard!

Regarding chipsets: The chipset is what makes your motherboard work. Different chipsets support different things, and have different integrated features. Chipset companies are usually very competitive, especially third party ones such as nVIDIA, VIA and SiS. In general the newer a chipset is for a given series of processors, the better the performance will be.

However, the first few motherboards with a brand new chipset are more likely to have problems then motherboards produced later on. Often these sorts of problems are cleared up through patches, bios updates, and other fixes but it can be disappointing to get the latest, hottest new motherboard on the market and then find out it doesn’t like part x due to a bios problem after you install the board.

The saying goes: “If you stay on bleeding edge, then you are likely to bleed.” The best thing to do is to research the motherboard you are interested in at the manufacturer’s website and at popular review website. It usually isn’t a good sign if the motherboard manufacturer does not have at least one bios update available.

Also, motherboard manufacturers learn from the mistakes of their rivals and from their own previous mistakes. The third or fourth motherboard that hits the market using a new chipset is less likely to have problems than the first one to hit the market.

To integrate or not to integrate? Integration is a current industry trend. It saves cost and space to integrate as many components onto the motherboard as possible such as video, audio, modem, and network card. Integrated motherboards tend to have limitations on future upgrade ability and expandability. It is not recommended for power users. It may however serve first time and budget-minded buyers and as a second machine as well.

The reliability of integrated motherboards have improved significantly in recent years, although the chances for something to go wrong on an integrated motherboard is still higher than a non-integrated one.

Convenience factor: If you are familiar with or have a large installation base with one brand/model of motherboard, staying with the same brand may help you minimize the number of manuals to keep. If nothing else, you want to keep your motherboard manual for as long as possible in the event of a problem with the manufacturer.

Motherboard manufacturers now usually offer downloadable versions of their manuals online in order to assists their customers and to provide a way to correct errata. However, some manufacturers have been known to change the features on a motherboard without changing motherboard model. This creates problems later on if you have to download a manual, as the motherboard you have may be different than the revised one that manual is meant for.

If volume matters to you, guess who is by far the number one motherboard manufacturer in sales? Intel. Their volume comes mainly from OEM channels! Asus and Gigabytes/MSI are in second and third places.