Holiday Motherboard Guide

Midrange Performance

Moving on up in price, we have the midrange performance segment, with prices stretching from $125 to $200. Yes, like GPUs we now include $200 motherboards in the "midrange" price segment. Just remember that similar to graphics cards, for many people there's no reason to look beyond the midrange offerings.

Intel

Honestly, after using the Gigabyte EP45-UD3R, we wondered what boards could be recommended in the $125 to $200 range. We found a couple, mainly based on excellent performance for the active enthusiast and of course great feature sets.

A top P45 board for overclocking the Wolfdale dual-core processors is the Biostar TPower I45 that is currently selling for around $160. This board easily reaches 600+ FSB with a good E8600 while offering a very good feature set.Without spending over $200 on high end P45 or X48 boards, this is the board to use if overclocking is of prime importance to you. Our only knock against the board is that it does not overclock quad-core processors as well as the Gigabyte or ASUS boards.

The big brother to the UD3R in our budget category is the $137 Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P that has a similar feature set but adds a second x16 slot (in place of a PCI slot) for dual x8 CrossFire operation. The board provides an excellent overclocking platform along with great stability.  If the second x16 slot is not important to you, we suggest sticking with the UD3R.

We really like the $144 ASUS P5Q-E that features the P45 and ICH10R chipsets. ASUS provides the ADI AD2000B HD Audio codec, dual Gigabit LAN, 16GB memory support, six 3Gb/s ports capable of RAID 0/1/10/5, two additional 3Gb/s SATA ports, IEEE 1394A, 12 USB ports, 8-phase power design, and Quiet Thermal technology. Overclocking has been very good with our E8600 reaching a 540FSB level and stability has been excellent also.

Honorable mentions go to the unique uATX based DFI LP JR P45-T2RS, MSI P7N SLI Platinum, and EVGA 750i FTW boards.

AMD

This a tough category as there are several very good boards grouped in the $140 range; however, we did not find any boards near $100 that performed as well as boards in the $150+ range, unlike in the Intel section. As a user, you must make a choice between an NVIDIA or AMD chipset if you ever plan on running a CrossFire or SLI setup.

On the 780a SLI front we really like the ASRock K10N780SLIX3-WiFi and Foxconn Destroyer boards. The ASRock 780a SLI offers a balanced combination of features, performance, and support while the Destroyer is one of the top AMD overclocking boards we have in the labs now.

We think the $190 price tag is too much for a 790FX/SB750 setup, but we cannot deny the fact that the ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe is one of the most loaded and best performing AMD boards we have used this year. ASUS loads the board with Gigabit LAN, ADI AD2000B 8-channel HD audio, IEEE 1394 support, four PCI-E x16 slots (dual x16, tri x16/x8/x8, or quad x8), two PCI slots, a single eSATA port, and six 3Gb/s SATA ports featuring RAID 0/1/10/5. The BIOS is fully featured for overclocking and we easily reached 3.5GHz on our 9950BE.

Although expensive for a 790GX board, the DFI LP JR 790GX-M2RS is a uATX board designed with overclocking in mind. We really like this board for a fast small form factor setup. Our other two 790GX choices are the Biostar TA790GX3 A2+ and Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H.

Honorable mentions go to the MSI DKA790GX Platinum, Foxconn A79A-S, and the extremely impressive but not widely available J&W MINIX 780G-SP128MB. The J&W board is based on the 780G and is not considered a performance board, but its cost places it in this category. However, if you are looking to build an AMD based ITX form factor setup, this is a great board to purchase.