eTeknix Christmas Hardware Buying Guide

The best Motherboards for Christmas

The best motherboards at each of the previously used price points vary depending on the platform. I.e. it is difficult to argue a particular AM3+ board is better than a LGA 1155 board, it is the hardware in the motherboards which makes the difference. Consequently we will look at the best motherboards to be paired with the processors and graphics cards at the £50, £100 and £150 price points we recommended earlier.

£50+ price point

The motherboard we think would be best paired with the processor and graphics card we picked at the £50 price point (HD 6670 and Athlon II 455) is the ASUS M5A78L LE 760G motherboard as this board comes in at £50 and supports a good graphics card (like a HD 6670) and 4 DIMM slots of RAM up to 16GB in capacity. It also has a lot of expansion ports for sound cards and network cards. There is SATA II and USB 2.0 support but you could easily buy a USB 3.0 add in card should you so need it.

Pair this with a HD 6670 and Athlon II 455 and you have the barebones of an entry level gaming system for just £150.

£100+ price point

We are assuming at this price point that you have made one of two decisions based on our two recommendations. Should you choose to avoid buying a video card to minimise expenditure you can pair the A8-3850 with a decent FM1 board such as this MSI A55M-P35 motherboard which would allow you to build a decent gaming system for £150 that could easily be improved by adding in a graphics card and running hybrid crossfire with the integrated graphics on the A8-3850 APU.

However, we think it would make more sense to get a board like this Gigabyte Z68 DS3 costing £75 and combine it with an i3 2120 and GTX 460 for a nifty little gaming system capable of taking on most games in full 1080P beauty at high settings. This barebones combination would cost a respectable £295.

£150+ price point

If you were to have taken our earlier advice and pair a 2500K with a HD 6870 for about £300, then you could have these components in an ASUS P8 Z68 M-PRO motherboard and this combination would give you the ability to run most games at the absolute highest settings when using a 1080P resolution. Arguably with a bit of overclocking and tweaking of the GPU and CPU you could make this system future proof against more intensive games that are likely to arrive. A barebones system like this sets you back about £420.