When building your own PC, you might easily fall into the trap that many others have fallen before you understanding the importance of the motherboard. Investing in the highest-end chips, SSDs, and graphics cards can end up to be a major disappointment if you are not paired with the right motherboard.
When shopping for motherboard, you should Consider the brand, capacity, and even durability. Motherboards are not cheap, so it is only reasonable for you to want to squeeze as much performance and life out of them as possible.
Now, We take a look at the 4 best EATX motherboards and summarized their hits and misses to make your decision making a lot easier. We hope you find this list useful and share it with your friends!
Intended for the high-end PC user, the ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex LGA1151 sports a very distinct and sharp look formed by the cutouts in its PCB and its RGB LEDs. It would be a sleek addition to any modern build.
Although the two DIMM slots may not be sufficient, especially if you use up a lot of memory and the SATA 3 ports may not be enough for some, we think that the ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex LGA1151 does attempt to make up for these with the added Ethernet jack and USB 3.1.
This motherboard is compatible with i3, i5, and i7 and uses the Z370 Intel chipset. Overclocking can reach an easy 5 GHz, and the entire unit is very easy to set up.
The only issues that may discourage you from buying this are that there is no AC wifi, and the required DDR4 memory card can be quite costly. The number of ports may be an issue as well, but they should not be major deterrents.
In general, we think that the ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex LGA1151 is well worth the price. It is expensive and obviously intended for the high-end PC-using market and it does have a few hiccups here and there, but the overall value is remarkable.
According to reports, ASUS wanted the Apex to be the king of overclocking, and the ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex LGA1151 appears to indeed do that well.
This motherboard has long been a favorite of gamers because of the way it combines aesthetics and other gaming-related features while remaining reasonably priced. At this price range, the ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E offers a few other bonuses that are not available in other motherboards.
This is powered by AMD's Ryzen Threadripper. If you have been into building gaming PCs for a while now, you will recognize AMD and their reputation for making some of the best processors there are.
You get AC wifi, USB 3.1 and 2.0 ports, dual M.2 drives, and up to 128 GB DDR4 memory. In our opinion, these are quite robust and should benefit even intense gamers.
In summary, we think the X399-E gaming motherboard does give justice to its name. For a reasonable price, even very frequent gamers can enjoy the speeds, performance, and overclocking of more expensive motherboards. Your only potential gripe is the expensive DDR4 required. But then again, building your own gaming PC has always been costly.
Making up such an ambitious name for a motherboard disproportionately raises expectations. Looking at the features MSI put in their Godlike Gaming motherboard, it appears they may be very ready to prove themselves.
Like many modern motherboards, Godlike Gaming is compatible with 8th generation Intel Core processors. This is a nice feature because it increases the versatility of your motherboard.
One issue you may have with it is that it has some features that you would rather exchange for something less flashy but more functional, like the triple gigabit jacks.
Godlike Gaming is by no means a perfect motherboard. In fact, it works so hard to be perfect that it ends up stuffing itself with features that can be switched for something a lot more functional.
The X299 is a good general-purpose motherboard. It does not attempt to do too much and is not marketed toward any one market segment. We think this is a good idea because as a general user, you do not want to end up paying for features you do not use because you ended up buying a gaming motherboard, for example.
In our opinion, there are just enough ports in the X299 for the general Consumer. There are 8 SATA6 ports, two U.2 connectors, and various others.
The only thing that may prevent you from purchasing it is that it runs only on Windows 10 because of its Intel drivers. It does not work with any older Windows.
If you are a general PC user with more or less common requirements, we think you will do well with the X299. It is not strictly for gaming, rendering, or everything else in between, but your general use should be addressed quite nicely.