Holiday Motherboard Guide

Budget Performance and HTPC Boards

We are looking in the $75~$115 range in this category, with a bit of extra wiggle room for the HTPC picks.

Intel

For the Intel side, two boards stand out amongst the others. First up is one of our favorite budget performance boards we have tested in the last few years, although nothing on this board really screams budget. The $115 ($100 with MIR) Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R features the P45 and ICH10R chipsets. Gigabyte also tosses in the Realtek ALC 889a HD Audio codec, 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, and Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 3 technology. The BIOS caters to the overclocker and this board just performs great. Our E8600 easily reached 540FSB if that is important and did it a very stable manner. Gigabyte also tosses in their EasyTune 6 application along with their DualBIOS technology. All in all, this is one of the better "budget performance" boards we have used in a long time.

Our second board is a favorite also. The $97 ($82 with MIR) ASUS P5Q SE Plus based on the Intel P45 and ICH10 chipsets. The board features one PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots, 16GB memory support, Gigabit LAN, 7.1 HD Audio, 12 USB ports, six 3Gb/s SATA ports, and an 8-phase power delivery system. Overclocking has been very good with our E8600 easily reaching over 500FSB -- more than enough for most buyers in this category.

Honorable mentions go out to the Biostar TP43D2-A7 P43 based board, MSI P43 Neo3-F, Foxconn P45A-S, and the ASRock P43 Twins1600.

AMD

The $75 to $115 range is extremely crowded on the AMD side and there are numerous boards not listed here that we would recommend for a variety of reasons ranging from performance to features to support.

First up is the $90 ASUS M3N78-EM based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset. The board features one PCI-E x16 slot, one PCI-E x1 slot, two PCI slots, 8GB memory support, NVIDIA Gigabit LAN, 7.1 HD Audio, 12 USB ports, five 3Gb/s SATA ports with RAID support, IEEE 1394a, one eSATA port, HDMI/DVI/VGA output, and full support for the Phenom 140W processors. This board offers overclocking capabilities along with being a top notch HTPC capable board. We highly recommend the GF8200/8300 series for the HTPC market due to hardware accelerated BD playback, multi-channel LPCM output, and very good application performance.

Our second board is based on the 790GX chipset. The $100 Biostar TForce TA790GX features the 790GX and SB750 chipsets. Biostar also tosses in 64MB DDR2 Side-Port memory, Realtek ALC 888 HD Audio codec, Gigabit LAN, 16GB memory support, six 3Gb/s ports capable of RAID 0/1/10/5, 10 USB ports, two PCI-E x16 slots (dual x8 CF), two PCI-E x1 slots, and two PCI slots. The BIOS caters to the casual overclocker and this board just performs very well in a variety of tests.

Honorable mentions go out to the JetWay JPA78VM3-H-LF, Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3P, and MSI K9A2 CF-F V2.

HTPC

We have two favorites right now in the Intel category. The $135 Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H and $110 ZOTAC GF9300 feature the NVIDIA GF9400 and GF9300 chipsets respectively. We favor these chipsets over the Intel G45 in the HTPC arena due to superior video playback and overall system performance. Expect to see reviews of both boards shortly as we gear back up in our look at IGP systems. On the AMD side we favor the GeForce 8200/8300 chipsets and particulary like the ASUS M3N78-EM.  If multi-channel LPCM is not important, most of the 790GX and 780G boards would make good choices.