**Choosing the Right Motherboard for Your Gaming PC**

When it comes to choosing the right motherboard for your gaming PC, there are many factors to consider. In this video, I'll be discussing my five favorite motherboard features that I believe are worth considering when building a gaming PC.

**First and foremost: Debug LEDs are Okay**

One of the things I think is great about some motherboards is their debug LEDs. A debug LED is usually a two-digit LED readout that displays a code as your system is booting up, which can be very useful for troubleshooting. Additionally, after your system boots, it will often show your system temperature using larger LED numbers, making it readable even in low-light conditions. These features are not typically found on budget or mid-range motherboards, but they're definitely worth considering if you want to upgrade to a higher-end board.

**Useful Features for Troubleshooting**

Another category of useful features is those that can help with troubleshooting. One such feature is the ability to flash your UEFI or BIOS without having to install a CPU or memory. This feature is often called "USB BIOS Flashback" or "BIOS Flash Plus," and it's incredibly useful, especially for Ryzen series motherboards, which are constantly coming out with new CPUs that require updates to older motherboards.

**Clear CMOS Buttons**

Another feature I think is really handy is a clear CMOS button. Having this externally on the rear IO panel allows you to easily reset the BIOS back to default if you need to adjust some settings or if an overclocking attempt didn't work out. This feature can be a real lifesaver when troubleshooting issues with your system.

**Advanced Fan Controls**

Finally, advanced fan controls are something I think is really important for building a gaming PC. Most motherboards will have some level of fan control, but having more fan headers on the board and advanced fan controls can give you a lot more flexibility when setting up your fans to keep things cool and quiet.

**Why Mid-Range Boards are Still the Sweet Spot**

One thing I want to emphasize is that mid-range boards are still my recommendation for most people building a gaming PC. At this price point, you're getting all of these useful features that can help with troubleshooting and customization, without breaking the bank. And let's be real, most people aren't going to use every single feature on their motherboard - they'll just stick with what works.

**Why High-End Boards are Worth Considering**

That being said, if you're devoting yourself to one of the more costly niches of PC building, such as extreme overclocking or custom water cooling, then a high-end motherboard might be worth considering. These boards often have all sorts of advanced features that can help take your system to the next level.

**Links and Resources**

If you want to learn more about these features and see examples of motherboards with them, I've got links to some websites and videos in the description below. And if you're interested in buying any of the parts I mentioned today, be sure to check out my store at Paul's Hardware dot net - I've got shirts, mugs, pint glasses, and all sorts of other fun swag that'll make you look like a real PC enthusiast.

**Thumbs Up, Thanks, and See You in the Next Video**

Finally, if you found this video helpful and informative, please be sure to give it a thumbs up - it really helps me out! And if you've got any questions or comments about motherboards or building PCs in general, leave them down in the comments below. I'll do my best to respond and help out anyone who needs it. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni've been lucky enough to play around with a lot of high-end motherboards here on my youtube channel and that's because they get sent to me for product launches and for reviews and for builds that i do and stuff but i often wonder who actually buys these things who pays 700 or more for something like an msi godlike or an asus rog extreme or gigabyte oris extreme motherboard i have no idea to be perfectly honest i've never met anyone who's just bought one of these types of boards straight up but today i'm going to do my best to stand up for these overpriced monstrosities by asking an even better question than who buys them what features do boards like these have that you might actually want the lowly 200 mid-range board doesn't have excellent team groups dark z series of ddr4 gaming memory features an aggressive yet stylish armored design with high performance aluminum alloy heatsinks to keep thermals in check the dark z series uses specially selected high quality modules to achieve ddr4 speeds up to 3600 with xmp 2.0 support for easy setup and kits are available in capacities of up to 32 gigabytes per dimm perfect for a gaming pc or a high-end workstation click the sponsor link in the description for more so here's how i think about motherboards in general when it comes to price range you've got your super budget options which are often as cheap as 50 to 80 bucks which are invariably cut down in some stupid way like they only have two dimm slots for memory or they have zero vrm cooling or they're using some kind of weak sauce chipset so i generally avoid them then you've got the more standard budget boards starting around 80 or 90 dollars going up into the low hundred dollar range then there's the solid mid-range from about 140 up to 200 bucks those are what i would classify as your middle class boards then you can step up to your upper middle class boards from say 200 to 300 then anything above 300 bucks is high-end in my book these prices can scale up a bit if you're talking about a higher-end chipset board like x570 for example or if you're going for a high-end desktop solution like trx-40 this is not trx40 it's x 399 but you get the point these are designed for threadripper cpus which now go all the way up to 64 cores on the intel high-end desktop side they're using x299 motherboards and the lga 2066 chipset you get things with the high-end desktop platform like a lot of pci express lanes and stuff that can definitely be worth the money but for today's purposes i'm mainly focusing on the motherboard features rather than the capabilities of the platform overall but the fact is for the vast majority of gaming pcs you can almost always go with one of those well-reviewed budget boards around maybe a hundred dollars or you'd have a bit wider selection of those solid mid-range boards which might have a few more useful features for you in the say 150 to 200 bracket that's almost always what i recommend to reality check a bit though let's look at actual motherboard pricing and availability right now on newegg so i'm just looking at motherboards and i'm just looking at am4 socket cpus which would basically cover all of your amd options if i remove that am4 filter then you'll also start to see trx40 boards in this list and those can also be quite expensive however again with the high-end desktop stuff i think there's another argument to be made for content creators and people who are actually going to take advantage of stuff like 64 pci express lanes sticking to the am4 socket type though that will bring us down to the mainstream stuff which is going to be based on the x570 chipset for the high end then you might see some b550 and b450 stuff in there as you scroll down now if you get up to the max price range of 300 here you'll find quite a few different options with quite a few different features but going beyond that you'll see it suddenly scales up pretty quickly to 400 and then beyond that you've got your 500 600 and 700 options but all across the top here for 500 plus you have asrock msi asus and gigabyte they all offer some variety of super high-end x570 motherboard asrock has the x570 creator right here uh for 500 msi has the prestige x570 creation very distinct from creator msi also has their godlike which is not currently for sale on newegg but that's the one that's actually going for 700 and is still x570 the creation board is geared a little bit more towards content creation gigabyte has the x570 aorus xtreme which is the most expensive x570 motherboard listed on newegg however it does have a unique feature that other x570 motherboards lack or i guess it lacks a feature that other x570 motherboards have it has a pretty extensive heat pipe heat dissipation configuration on this board which means they don't have to have a fan this is one of the only motherboards that has that for asus you have the rg crosshair 8 formula for x 570 which is going for 600 and this being a formula board from the asus rog line formula boards are always geared a little bit more towards water cooling that's why this one has an integrated water block for the vrm so the power delivery for the cpu you can use this passively or you can pipe in with gina quarter fittings your own custom water cooled loop through that so those are your mainstream amd options if you're going for ryzen intel of course also has high-end motherboards and if you're just looking at intel's current generation platforms which is lga 1200 for mainstream 2066 and 3647 for your high-end desktops and then lga 1151 is what was just recently supplanted with the launch of lga 1200 but you can still find quite a few lga 1151 options out there that said at the very top you have lga 3647 which uses a intel c621 or c622 chipset evga gigabytes and asus all have boards designed for this platform but these are basically server motherboards and even high-end server motherboards that have just been uh branded for consumer purchase so they're not really very practical to look at so if we remove those then we can see our mainstream high-end motherboards on intel's mainstream platform which is currently z490 lga 1200 there is even a z390 aorus extreme waterfall sport still in here but here you can see boards that cost like 1300 for a motherboard again which is fairly absurd but this one has a value proposition of like hey if you're going water cooling why not buy a board that has the water cooling integrated not just like a monoblock or something like you'd slap on but it's actually designed to tie in with the aesthetics of the board and this might be something that looks really cool to you or maybe even that you're interested in if you're interested in water cooling but but thirteen hundred dollars just for the motherboard is that's a that's a significant price that's a significant cost for that board azrak also did a z490 water cooled in the z490 aqua which is about eleven hundred dollars here again you can just see i mean these are cool configurations they they're water cooling not just the cpu itself but the v arms around it and the chipset that's not something that's easy to do if you're trying to build something yourself and get custom parts for example so of course you've got your water cooling support you've got your high-end overclocking support and there's a handful of other nice high-end options that motherboard manufacturers like to throw at boards like these and i've gone through all these features and sorted them so you've got actual useful features we'll go over those first you've got features that i find to be not useful or that you should look for other solutions for and that's your not useful category i guess and then i've got the in between might be useful depending on your situation let's start with the actually useful stuff that serves a practical or useful purpose or it provides a feature or component that would otherwise be a costly upgrade that you might need to pay for separately and the first thing at the top is a 10 gigabit nick or network interface card motherboards have shipped with the ethernet jacks for quite some time just a standard rj45 jack and the standard there has been a gigabit connection for a long time which is just fine for most people's at-home usage however if you want to step up 10 gigabit has been the standard in the server and enterprise world for quite some time if you need to move a lot of data between computers or over a local area network but the hardware for a 10 gigabit network has also been quite expensive 10 gigabit adapter cards like this one here that ships uh with stuff like the asus xtreme boards you can purchase now and you can actually get a decent 10 gigabit nick for less than a hundred dollars but that's still around 100 investments that hey if it comes in the box then you've already got that and you don't need to pay extra for it and if you're looking at our list of x 570 expensive motherboard options here whether you're looking at msi asus gigabyte or azrock all of these ship with an upgraded nick or a network interface card you can see that listed right here for asrock the equantia 10 gig lan for msi 10 gigabit super lan for gigabyte as well the quantia adapter which is a common adapter to use in these higher end motherboards and it's actually only the asus board which is 600 rather than 500 which doesn't ship with that it does have an upgraded nick it's just a five gig nick yes and a quantity of solution but it only goes up to five gigabit now granted you're going to need network switches that are also 10 gigabit to take advantage of something like this but if it's something that you're working on in your home or a small office or something like that getting boards that already have it is something that you might be interested in that said again you can easily buy adapter cards like this and pop them onto any board as long as they've got a pretty standard pci express that looks like a by four connection but there it is i consider that to be a useful thing here's my next useful thing and that is an m.2 riser card a multi-adapter card something that allows you to add more m.2 storage drives onto your board than you might already have a lot of boards like the god-like will integrate multiple m.2 slots on the board so this one has i think three integrated there but positioning them right up against the board can often mean that they're stuck behind a graphics card or just don't have adequate airflow so a riser card is often a good solution for allowing a little bit more airflow over the m.2 drives or just giving yourself a lot more slots for them as long as of course you have the pci express bandwidth for that and there you might be a little bit limited if you're going with like the intel mainstream platform where you're only gonna have 16 pcie lanes directly from the cpu that gets into another question of whether you should go mains with a mainstream platform or a high-end desktop platform depending on the storage configuration you're putting together to try to stay grounded with the focus of this video though i just wanted to point out that's an additional m.2 riser card and this is one that's actually sold separately from asus the hyper m.2x16 riser card or something that asus has been doing for a few generations now is they have their dim.2 riser which is basically like a memory slot with an adapter card that can fit two m.2 drives on either side which is a really smart way in my opinion of allowing you to add a couple more drives to a board and it holds them vertically and it's in an area that's typically near the cpu and the vrm so that's an area that will likely get some airflow over it msi also ships an m.2 gen4 expander card with their god-like boards and that is one of those selling points of the boards that said add-on cards of this type can be purchased separately and depending on what they're capable of they might cost anywhere from i mean you can get them for 25 to 30 if you're just looking for a single or maybe a two drive solution if you want something that's gen 4 capable that can maybe hold up to four drives and that maybe has some active cooling integrated onto it as well they're gonna be looking at more like uh 70 80 or more actually the newest version of asus's card which is the hyper m.2x16 which is pcie 4.0 capable is only about 70 dollars available on amazon and that one does have a little fan to help keep things cool and it does support four m.2 drives so that's your second item i think that might be included with these boards that is useful that does have a monetary value or function uh but it is also something that you could maybe buy separately something you can't buy separately is going to be the cooling on the motherboard itself unless you're going into custom water cooling but more on that in just a second advanced cooling though is definitely something that you might pay a little bit more for on a motherboard and as i already mentioned this gigabyte x570 aorus extreme it really is a selling point of it it being the only uh x570 motherboard at least to my knowledge that is currently available that doesn't require an active fan on the chipset cooling solutions for a motherboard extend beyond just the cooling for the vrms and the chipset themselves though you might also have extra fan headers uh perhaps pump or aio headers on a motherboard specifically you might have more advanced control over those headers and the fan speeds in the bios a good example i have for this is the mini itx system that i put together uh late last year which has an asus crosshair 8 impact motherboard that is a 450 motherboard quite premium it's actually a mini dtx motherboard but that system in particular had a few fans in it and as the fans were ramping up and down they were wobbling they were creating some noise i could have swapped the fans out and tried something else but instead i went into the asus fan control in the uefi they have a ramp speed and how much time that takes by adjusting that ramp speed and how quickly it actually spins the fans up and spin them down i was basically able to eliminate the noise having those features available on a motherboard are really nice but again this is something that also bleeds down into the mid-range and upper mid-range motherboards they'll also also often have those features as well now i mentioned overclocking and these highest end boards should pretty much always have the best in class power delivery configurations as well as advanced overclocking tools this often includes an entire suite of features and it's very often in the upper right here of the motherboard so it can kind of be grouped somewhere that can be easily accessible by a professional overclocker who might have the board out on an open test bed for example but having something like an ln2 switch for extreme cooling options surface mounted voltage read points where you can connect a multi-meter to get actual true readouts for your memory and cpu voltage for example and of course just simple quality of life improvements like surface mounted power and reset buttons and other buttons that might clear the memory settings for example or have a slow mode boot option all these things might be really useful to an extreme overclocker is that you though are you an extreme overclocker maybe you are and maybe that's the reason you might be investing in a motherboard like this however i would also like to point out that when you add a bunch of stuff to a motherboard when you throw everything but the kitchen sink at it you're adding more complexity to it and more complexity is often what you don't want when it comes to overclocking with overclocking it often helps to keep things as simple as possible that is why for example asus as part of their rog series which is their highest end series of motherboards has developed a board called the apex as opposed to say the extreme and that is why if you look at the asus rog lineup of motherboards they have the intel side which is maximus they have the amd side which is crosshair if you're looking at the mainstream ones and then they'll have either the hero which is kind of their entry level rog they have the formula which is typically devoted to overclocking they have the impact which is typically your mini itx board they've had the gene and in the past which is micro atx i hope they bring that back at some point they've got the extreme like this one right here the zenith extreme zenith is for the threadripper platform and the extreme is supposed to be the best the top one that they make however they also have the apex and the apex as part of the rog series is an interesting board because it's just not really the most practical board for anyone who's building just a more normal system that you want to use at home on a day-to-day basis it's actually built for overclocking and you can see a lot of that going on here in the upper right whether it's voltage read points or all these switches which do various things or other buttons and things like that also note that there's only two memory slots on this board though that simplifies things and that's really good for memory overclocking and they've also positioned the memory as close to the cpu as possible i guess they call that optimum 3. i guess the point i'm trying to make here is that if you're trying to buy the motherboard that is the best at everything you might not actually be able to do that you might be able to buy the motherboard that is the best but if you want the motherboard that's the best for overclocking at least if you're looking at asus boards you'd probably want to go for the apex but if you're building a system for long-term use the apex might be missing some features that you might actually want i guess all that is to say that if you want the best overclocking experience yes these really expensive motherboards will provide that for you however even in msi's case for example their godlike motherboard has the exact same power delivery configuration as their ace motherboard which is still a 350 dollar motherboard which is expensive but you can still get that power delivery on a much less expensive motherboard and not have to pay the godlike money my next feature though is actually if i'm being honest the entire inspiration for this video and that is led lit audio jacks getting back to that mini itx system that i built it's been out in our living room and we've been setting it up occasionally to play video games out there while we also watch our daughter who's about 15 months old this means i've been unplugging and replugging stuff into it pretty constantly and this also means i've gained a new appreciation for led backlit audio jacks which to my knowledge is an asus only feature which also to my knowledge they had only been including on their highest and motherboards but they now also are starting to include it on lower end motherboards like i literally just found this out as i was planning another video the rfg strix b550-igaming which is a b550 motherboard which only costs around 220 dollars also has led lit audio jacks but i need to point this out because first of all it inspired this video i was looking at it and being like wow as i'm going to plug the the mic and headphone for the headset in over and over again multiple times and unplugging it and replugging it and sometimes it's dark and just looking down at it and you have little lights that shine out and like oh the the red one there is for the mic and the green one is for your standard stereo headphone and it just makes it a lot simpler to plug them in and the thought i had at the time was like ah that's a convenient feature but this is a 450 motherboard and i've only seen it on asus's really expensive stuff and then that got me thinking like oh well what really actually useful features are there on really expensive motherboards and tents you have this video i guess that one would boil down to if you plug and replug your mic and headphone jack uh very very often then you should uh perhaps invest in an asus motherboard that has those led lit jacks let's move to the uh in between stuff this is kind of more situational or potentially aesthetic only improvements that you would get when you pay more for a motherboard like this and of course a big one is going to be the water cooling support i almost classified this along with the overclocking support but the fact is with overclocking you might overclock or you might not and you might just decide to do that at any point whereas with water cooling especially if you're custom water cooling you kind of need to plan ahead for that so the reason this is in the middle tier is because for some people they might look at something like the z490 orris extreme and they might be planning a water cooled build and they might just think oh my gosh i need this because it looks really cool because it integrates everything together because it cools the chipset and the vrms and the cpu all all at the same time and because if you're planning on water cooling a motherboard you might actually have to invest some money for something like that i just quickly pulled up the ek monoblocks a monoblock is something that cools the cpu as well as the power delivery around it so this doesn't even include uh chipset cooling but these are going to cost you around 155-ish dollars and yes there are cpu blocks that are cheaper there's also more advanced blocks that might also cool the chipset that you can get that might cost more than this however i will say that if you want a fully integrated solution that's color matched with the rest of the aesthetics of the board and again that also might potentially cool the chipset it's really hard to replace uh some of these fully integrated solutions that have come out recently the premium for these boards though is just insane i mean you're talking six seven eight hundred dollars over even like a five hundred dollar version of these motherboards so you'd really have to be dedicated to your water cooling setup and also willing to spend a significantly higher amount of money to get that configuration as opposed to something like a monoblock or just air cooling other things that i think are in the sort of middle category where they might be useful to you or they might not would be advanced rgb lighting panels and these aren't just the headers on the motherboard themselves but a lot of motherboards are now including little extra panels on the board the godlike has like this display area over here we're lucky the dragon will come out and dance around for you and maybe that floats your boat and you think it's awesome and you should totally get it i just find it to be more in the middle category because lighting panels like that tend to they're aesthetic touches so it's not going to contribute to your performance and being an aesthetic touch you may or may not find it aesthetically pleasing similarly a lot of motherboards now are including back plates and backplates are something that we often call out for when it comes to a graphics card because it's very visible a backplate on a motherboard i find to be nice but not ultimately that useful simply because when the motherboard's actually installed you're not going to be seeing the back plate at all anymore and the vast majority of setups now that i think about it maybe the back plate should go in the category of things you should not pay more for at all but some people see a motherboard backplate and they go crazy like oh my gosh motherboard has a backplate that's kind of how i reacted at first but they're just not all that practical also what's not all that practical is just what i call a really cool design so a lot of higher end motherboards actually look pretty cool and i will hand it to a lot of the motherboard manufacturers they have designers who are designing not just for function but also for form now because a lot of people pay attention to that as they build their own computer i've looked at plenty of budget entry-level motherboards and you looked at them and they're like uh you know it looks okay but it's not that great the higher end you get though the more beefy and substantial motherboards look and uh there might be some pretty cool design elements there again something that i wouldn't necessarily recommend you pay a bunch more for but for some people they see a design and like oh my gosh that speaks to me that's what i need to put in my next system so that's why i place that in the middle category it might affect you it might not here are extras that in my opinion you should not be paying more for the first is high-end audio this is actually one of the selling points for a lot of different motherboards yes motherboard audio has improved and most motherboards have audio solutions that are perfectly adequate and even the high-end motherboards have audio solutions that are demonstrably better and they even start to get into crossover features like support for high impedance headphones and stuff like that in my opinion though if you really want to get into that audio file category and you're talking about using your computer as a source you should invest in a dac an external dac to be more specific they're probably going to cost you 200 or more but if you really want that audio file high-end experience you should remove the analog to digital conversion from the electrically noisy environment of your computer and put it separately somewhere else then you just connect via usb usb signals digital so it's not subject to interference and then you'll have a much nicer experience with your audio that's not to say that the integrated high-end audio is worthless in these uh more expensive motherboards it's just that if you're really getting into that stuff a dac is absolutely the way to go also an integrated led panel i kind of talked about that being sort of the fancier features here but they also have these led panels integrated that you're supposed that are supposed to display pertinent system information and stuff like that and in my opinion when it's attached to a motherboard sitting there back in the case with maybe a tinted tempered glass side panel in front of it and rgb leds going on and stuff like that it's just hard to see practically speaking it's difficult to actually get any useful information from those types of panels so for that solution i would advise getting a separate a little led panel which you can connect up via usb and control on your own via software a debug led is okay and i definitely approve and recommend of that but those more advanced panels i think are just not worth paying the extra money for the motherboard for finally anything less than a 10 gigabit nick you shouldn't be investing in the motherboard for because 10 gigabit knicks are easy to get a hold of and in my opinion going less than 10 gigabit is kind of cutting things down i was actually a little disappointed when i saw that the crosshair 8 formula did not have a 10 gigabit nick i have one last category which is actually useful features but useful features that are also potentially available on mid-range boards so these are features that i recommend you shop for but you don't necessarily need to pay 700 bucks in order to get i have a full video that i already did on this so i'll link that in the description if you want to watch that whole thing it's called my five favorite motherboard features but i'm just going to run down them really quickly first off surface mounted power and reset buttons very useful to have typically not found on your super budget or mid-range budget boards but once you get to the mid-range and higher that will often be something that's included an led post readout or debug led is usually a two-digit led readout that this that displays a code as your system is booting up useful for troubleshooting and then often after your system boots it will show your system temperature and since it's larger led numbers that's usually readable too uh the ability to flash your uefi or bios without a cpu or memory installed i think is just one of the most useful features it's called different things by different companies asus calls it usb bios flashback i think msi calls it bios flashback plus but that's really nice to have especially on the ryzen series motherboards because there's lots of new ryzen cpus that come out that are compatible with other older motherboards but you need to update the older motherboard in order to recognize the the new cpu another thing you might need while troubleshooting is a clear cmos button and having that externally on the rear i o panel is really helpful as well if you need to just reset the bios back to default so you can get back into it to adjust some settings or if you're going for an overclock that didn't work out that's really nice to have and finally those advanced fan controls most motherboards will have some level of this but advanced fan controls combined with more fan headers on the board will also give you more flexibility for setting up your fans the way you want to and also having a lot of them if you want lots of airflow to keep things nice and cool and all of those things can often be found on motherboards that cost around 200 bucks and that's still my recommendation most of the time and there is a reason that my motherboard recommendations for building a gaming pc tend to all be about in the one to two hundred dollar price range most people really just don't need much more than that unless you're devoting yourself to one of the more costly niches of pc building extreme overclocking or custom water cooling the extra features that a 700 motherboard provide often go unused or can be purchased separately as ad-hoc upgrades like a 10 gigabit nick or an m.2 pcie adapter if they are really needed but please don't feel bad if you've already gone out and bought a high-end motherboard that it's not really my intent with this video building your own pc is about choosing the parts that suit your needs or your aesthetic tastes best and if the board you've got your eye on has that perfect mix of looks and features and maybe one or two drool-worthy high-end things you can't go without then you should just go for it and be confident in your decision but that is gonna wrap it up for this video you guys and i'm very curious if there was anything i missed i tried to be pretty thorough and going over the features that are available on the current generation of high-end motherboards but maybe there's something in there that you were like oh my gosh i need that motherboard even if it's 600 bucks because it has this let me know what that thing is and what that motherboard is down in the comment section down below while you're down there of course in the description i'll put links to uh various things i've talked about today and links to websites and stuff like that also link to my store where you can buy stuff at paul's hardware dot net shirts mugs pint glasses to help support my channel and get yourself some super sweet merch if you want to hit the thumbs up button on the way out that is very much appreciated as well thank you very much for watching this video you guys and we'll see you in the next onei've been lucky enough to play around with a lot of high-end motherboards here on my youtube channel and that's because they get sent to me for product launches and for reviews and for builds that i do and stuff but i often wonder who actually buys these things who pays 700 or more for something like an msi godlike or an asus rog extreme or gigabyte oris extreme motherboard i have no idea to be perfectly honest i've never met anyone who's just bought one of these types of boards straight up but today i'm going to do my best to stand up for these overpriced monstrosities by asking an even better question than who buys them what features do boards like these have that you might actually want the lowly 200 mid-range board doesn't have excellent team groups dark z series of ddr4 gaming memory features an aggressive yet stylish armored design with high performance aluminum alloy heatsinks to keep thermals in check the dark z series uses specially selected high quality modules to achieve ddr4 speeds up to 3600 with xmp 2.0 support for easy setup and kits are available in capacities of up to 32 gigabytes per dimm perfect for a gaming pc or a high-end workstation click the sponsor link in the description for more so here's how i think about motherboards in general when it comes to price range you've got your super budget options which are often as cheap as 50 to 80 bucks which are invariably cut down in some stupid way like they only have two dimm slots for memory or they have zero vrm cooling or they're using some kind of weak sauce chipset so i generally avoid them then you've got the more standard budget boards starting around 80 or 90 dollars going up into the low hundred dollar range then there's the solid mid-range from about 140 up to 200 bucks those are what i would classify as your middle class boards then you can step up to your upper middle class boards from say 200 to 300 then anything above 300 bucks is high-end in my book these prices can scale up a bit if you're talking about a higher-end chipset board like x570 for example or if you're going for a high-end desktop solution like trx-40 this is not trx40 it's x 399 but you get the point these are designed for threadripper cpus which now go all the way up to 64 cores on the intel high-end desktop side they're using x299 motherboards and the lga 2066 chipset you get things with the high-end desktop platform like a lot of pci express lanes and stuff that can definitely be worth the money but for today's purposes i'm mainly focusing on the motherboard features rather than the capabilities of the platform overall but the fact is for the vast majority of gaming pcs you can almost always go with one of those well-reviewed budget boards around maybe a hundred dollars or you'd have a bit wider selection of those solid mid-range boards which might have a few more useful features for you in the say 150 to 200 bracket that's almost always what i recommend to reality check a bit though let's look at actual motherboard pricing and availability right now on newegg so i'm just looking at motherboards and i'm just looking at am4 socket cpus which would basically cover all of your amd options if i remove that am4 filter then you'll also start to see trx40 boards in this list and those can also be quite expensive however again with the high-end desktop stuff i think there's another argument to be made for content creators and people who are actually going to take advantage of stuff like 64 pci express lanes sticking to the am4 socket type though that will bring us down to the mainstream stuff which is going to be based on the x570 chipset for the high end then you might see some b550 and b450 stuff in there as you scroll down now if you get up to the max price range of 300 here you'll find quite a few different options with quite a few different features but going beyond that you'll see it suddenly scales up pretty quickly to 400 and then beyond that you've got your 500 600 and 700 options but all across the top here for 500 plus you have asrock msi asus and gigabyte they all offer some variety of super high-end x570 motherboard asrock has the x570 creator right here uh for 500 msi has the prestige x570 creation very distinct from creator msi also has their godlike which is not currently for sale on newegg but that's the one that's actually going for 700 and is still x570 the creation board is geared a little bit more towards content creation gigabyte has the x570 aorus xtreme which is the most expensive x570 motherboard listed on newegg however it does have a unique feature that other x570 motherboards lack or i guess it lacks a feature that other x570 motherboards have it has a pretty extensive heat pipe heat dissipation configuration on this board which means they don't have to have a fan this is one of the only motherboards that has that for asus you have the rg crosshair 8 formula for x 570 which is going for 600 and this being a formula board from the asus rog line formula boards are always geared a little bit more towards water cooling that's why this one has an integrated water block for the vrm so the power delivery for the cpu you can use this passively or you can pipe in with gina quarter fittings your own custom water cooled loop through that so those are your mainstream amd options if you're going for ryzen intel of course also has high-end motherboards and if you're just looking at intel's current generation platforms which is lga 1200 for mainstream 2066 and 3647 for your high-end desktops and then lga 1151 is what was just recently supplanted with the launch of lga 1200 but you can still find quite a few lga 1151 options out there that said at the very top you have lga 3647 which uses a intel c621 or c622 chipset evga gigabytes and asus all have boards designed for this platform but these are basically server motherboards and even high-end server motherboards that have just been uh branded for consumer purchase so they're not really very practical to look at so if we remove those then we can see our mainstream high-end motherboards on intel's mainstream platform which is currently z490 lga 1200 there is even a z390 aorus extreme waterfall sport still in here but here you can see boards that cost like 1300 for a motherboard again which is fairly absurd but this one has a value proposition of like hey if you're going water cooling why not buy a board that has the water cooling integrated not just like a monoblock or something like you'd slap on but it's actually designed to tie in with the aesthetics of the board and this might be something that looks really cool to you or maybe even that you're interested in if you're interested in water cooling but but thirteen hundred dollars just for the motherboard is that's a that's a significant price that's a significant cost for that board azrak also did a z490 water cooled in the z490 aqua which is about eleven hundred dollars here again you can just see i mean these are cool configurations they they're water cooling not just the cpu itself but the v arms around it and the chipset that's not something that's easy to do if you're trying to build something yourself and get custom parts for example so of course you've got your water cooling support you've got your high-end overclocking support and there's a handful of other nice high-end options that motherboard manufacturers like to throw at boards like these and i've gone through all these features and sorted them so you've got actual useful features we'll go over those first you've got features that i find to be not useful or that you should look for other solutions for and that's your not useful category i guess and then i've got the in between might be useful depending on your situation let's start with the actually useful stuff that serves a practical or useful purpose or it provides a feature or component that would otherwise be a costly upgrade that you might need to pay for separately and the first thing at the top is a 10 gigabit nick or network interface card motherboards have shipped with the ethernet jacks for quite some time just a standard rj45 jack and the standard there has been a gigabit connection for a long time which is just fine for most people's at-home usage however if you want to step up 10 gigabit has been the standard in the server and enterprise world for quite some time if you need to move a lot of data between computers or over a local area network but the hardware for a 10 gigabit network has also been quite expensive 10 gigabit adapter cards like this one here that ships uh with stuff like the asus xtreme boards you can purchase now and you can actually get a decent 10 gigabit nick for less than a hundred dollars but that's still around 100 investments that hey if it comes in the box then you've already got that and you don't need to pay extra for it and if you're looking at our list of x 570 expensive motherboard options here whether you're looking at msi asus gigabyte or azrock all of these ship with an upgraded nick or a network interface card you can see that listed right here for asrock the equantia 10 gig lan for msi 10 gigabit super lan for gigabyte as well the quantia adapter which is a common adapter to use in these higher end motherboards and it's actually only the asus board which is 600 rather than 500 which doesn't ship with that it does have an upgraded nick it's just a five gig nick yes and a quantity of solution but it only goes up to five gigabit now granted you're going to need network switches that are also 10 gigabit to take advantage of something like this but if it's something that you're working on in your home or a small office or something like that getting boards that already have it is something that you might be interested in that said again you can easily buy adapter cards like this and pop them onto any board as long as they've got a pretty standard pci express that looks like a by four connection but there it is i consider that to be a useful thing here's my next useful thing and that is an m.2 riser card a multi-adapter card something that allows you to add more m.2 storage drives onto your board than you might already have a lot of boards like the god-like will integrate multiple m.2 slots on the board so this one has i think three integrated there but positioning them right up against the board can often mean that they're stuck behind a graphics card or just don't have adequate airflow so a riser card is often a good solution for allowing a little bit more airflow over the m.2 drives or just giving yourself a lot more slots for them as long as of course you have the pci express bandwidth for that and there you might be a little bit limited if you're going with like the intel mainstream platform where you're only gonna have 16 pcie lanes directly from the cpu that gets into another question of whether you should go mains with a mainstream platform or a high-end desktop platform depending on the storage configuration you're putting together to try to stay grounded with the focus of this video though i just wanted to point out that's an additional m.2 riser card and this is one that's actually sold separately from asus the hyper m.2x16 riser card or something that asus has been doing for a few generations now is they have their dim.2 riser which is basically like a memory slot with an adapter card that can fit two m.2 drives on either side which is a really smart way in my opinion of allowing you to add a couple more drives to a board and it holds them vertically and it's in an area that's typically near the cpu and the vrm so that's an area that will likely get some airflow over it msi also ships an m.2 gen4 expander card with their god-like boards and that is one of those selling points of the boards that said add-on cards of this type can be purchased separately and depending on what they're capable of they might cost anywhere from i mean you can get them for 25 to 30 if you're just looking for a single or maybe a two drive solution if you want something that's gen 4 capable that can maybe hold up to four drives and that maybe has some active cooling integrated onto it as well they're gonna be looking at more like uh 70 80 or more actually the newest version of asus's card which is the hyper m.2x16 which is pcie 4.0 capable is only about 70 dollars available on amazon and that one does have a little fan to help keep things cool and it does support four m.2 drives so that's your second item i think that might be included with these boards that is useful that does have a monetary value or function uh but it is also something that you could maybe buy separately something you can't buy separately is going to be the cooling on the motherboard itself unless you're going into custom water cooling but more on that in just a second advanced cooling though is definitely something that you might pay a little bit more for on a motherboard and as i already mentioned this gigabyte x570 aorus extreme it really is a selling point of it it being the only uh x570 motherboard at least to my knowledge that is currently available that doesn't require an active fan on the chipset cooling solutions for a motherboard extend beyond just the cooling for the vrms and the chipset themselves though you might also have extra fan headers uh perhaps pump or aio headers on a motherboard specifically you might have more advanced control over those headers and the fan speeds in the bios a good example i have for this is the mini itx system that i put together uh late last year which has an asus crosshair 8 impact motherboard that is a 450 motherboard quite premium it's actually a mini dtx motherboard but that system in particular had a few fans in it and as the fans were ramping up and down they were wobbling they were creating some noise i could have swapped the fans out and tried something else but instead i went into the asus fan control in the uefi they have a ramp speed and how much time that takes by adjusting that ramp speed and how quickly it actually spins the fans up and spin them down i was basically able to eliminate the noise having those features available on a motherboard are really nice but again this is something that also bleeds down into the mid-range and upper mid-range motherboards they'll also also often have those features as well now i mentioned overclocking and these highest end boards should pretty much always have the best in class power delivery configurations as well as advanced overclocking tools this often includes an entire suite of features and it's very often in the upper right here of the motherboard so it can kind of be grouped somewhere that can be easily accessible by a professional overclocker who might have the board out on an open test bed for example but having something like an ln2 switch for extreme cooling options surface mounted voltage read points where you can connect a multi-meter to get actual true readouts for your memory and cpu voltage for example and of course just simple quality of life improvements like surface mounted power and reset buttons and other buttons that might clear the memory settings for example or have a slow mode boot option all these things might be really useful to an extreme overclocker is that you though are you an extreme overclocker maybe you are and maybe that's the reason you might be investing in a motherboard like this however i would also like to point out that when you add a bunch of stuff to a motherboard when you throw everything but the kitchen sink at it you're adding more complexity to it and more complexity is often what you don't want when it comes to overclocking with overclocking it often helps to keep things as simple as possible that is why for example asus as part of their rog series which is their highest end series of motherboards has developed a board called the apex as opposed to say the extreme and that is why if you look at the asus rog lineup of motherboards they have the intel side which is maximus they have the amd side which is crosshair if you're looking at the mainstream ones and then they'll have either the hero which is kind of their entry level rog they have the formula which is typically devoted to overclocking they have the impact which is typically your mini itx board they've had the gene and in the past which is micro atx i hope they bring that back at some point they've got the extreme like this one right here the zenith extreme zenith is for the threadripper platform and the extreme is supposed to be the best the top one that they make however they also have the apex and the apex as part of the rog series is an interesting board because it's just not really the most practical board for anyone who's building just a more normal system that you want to use at home on a day-to-day basis it's actually built for overclocking and you can see a lot of that going on here in the upper right whether it's voltage read points or all these switches which do various things or other buttons and things like that also note that there's only two memory slots on this board though that simplifies things and that's really good for memory overclocking and they've also positioned the memory as close to the cpu as possible i guess they call that optimum 3. i guess the point i'm trying to make here is that if you're trying to buy the motherboard that is the best at everything you might not actually be able to do that you might be able to buy the motherboard that is the best but if you want the motherboard that's the best for overclocking at least if you're looking at asus boards you'd probably want to go for the apex but if you're building a system for long-term use the apex might be missing some features that you might actually want i guess all that is to say that if you want the best overclocking experience yes these really expensive motherboards will provide that for you however even in msi's case for example their godlike motherboard has the exact same power delivery configuration as their ace motherboard which is still a 350 dollar motherboard which is expensive but you can still get that power delivery on a much less expensive motherboard and not have to pay the godlike money my next feature though is actually if i'm being honest the entire inspiration for this video and that is led lit audio jacks getting back to that mini itx system that i built it's been out in our living room and we've been setting it up occasionally to play video games out there while we also watch our daughter who's about 15 months old this means i've been unplugging and replugging stuff into it pretty constantly and this also means i've gained a new appreciation for led backlit audio jacks which to my knowledge is an asus only feature which also to my knowledge they had only been including on their highest and motherboards but they now also are starting to include it on lower end motherboards like i literally just found this out as i was planning another video the rfg strix b550-igaming which is a b550 motherboard which only costs around 220 dollars also has led lit audio jacks but i need to point this out because first of all it inspired this video i was looking at it and being like wow as i'm going to plug the the mic and headphone for the headset in over and over again multiple times and unplugging it and replugging it and sometimes it's dark and just looking down at it and you have little lights that shine out and like oh the the red one there is for the mic and the green one is for your standard stereo headphone and it just makes it a lot simpler to plug them in and the thought i had at the time was like ah that's a convenient feature but this is a 450 motherboard and i've only seen it on asus's really expensive stuff and then that got me thinking like oh well what really actually useful features are there on really expensive motherboards and tents you have this video i guess that one would boil down to if you plug and replug your mic and headphone jack uh very very often then you should uh perhaps invest in an asus motherboard that has those led lit jacks let's move to the uh in between stuff this is kind of more situational or potentially aesthetic only improvements that you would get when you pay more for a motherboard like this and of course a big one is going to be the water cooling support i almost classified this along with the overclocking support but the fact is with overclocking you might overclock or you might not and you might just decide to do that at any point whereas with water cooling especially if you're custom water cooling you kind of need to plan ahead for that so the reason this is in the middle tier is because for some people they might look at something like the z490 orris extreme and they might be planning a water cooled build and they might just think oh my gosh i need this because it looks really cool because it integrates everything together because it cools the chipset and the vrms and the cpu all all at the same time and because if you're planning on water cooling a motherboard you might actually have to invest some money for something like that i just quickly pulled up the ek monoblocks a monoblock is something that cools the cpu as well as the power delivery around it so this doesn't even include uh chipset cooling but these are going to cost you around 155-ish dollars and yes there are cpu blocks that are cheaper there's also more advanced blocks that might also cool the chipset that you can get that might cost more than this however i will say that if you want a fully integrated solution that's color matched with the rest of the aesthetics of the board and again that also might potentially cool the chipset it's really hard to replace uh some of these fully integrated solutions that have come out recently the premium for these boards though is just insane i mean you're talking six seven eight hundred dollars over even like a five hundred dollar version of these motherboards so you'd really have to be dedicated to your water cooling setup and also willing to spend a significantly higher amount of money to get that configuration as opposed to something like a monoblock or just air cooling other things that i think are in the sort of middle category where they might be useful to you or they might not would be advanced rgb lighting panels and these aren't just the headers on the motherboard themselves but a lot of motherboards are now including little extra panels on the board the godlike has like this display area over here we're lucky the dragon will come out and dance around for you and maybe that floats your boat and you think it's awesome and you should totally get it i just find it to be more in the middle category because lighting panels like that tend to they're aesthetic touches so it's not going to contribute to your performance and being an aesthetic touch you may or may not find it aesthetically pleasing similarly a lot of motherboards now are including back plates and backplates are something that we often call out for when it comes to a graphics card because it's very visible a backplate on a motherboard i find to be nice but not ultimately that useful simply because when the motherboard's actually installed you're not going to be seeing the back plate at all anymore and the vast majority of setups now that i think about it maybe the back plate should go in the category of things you should not pay more for at all but some people see a motherboard backplate and they go crazy like oh my gosh motherboard has a backplate that's kind of how i reacted at first but they're just not all that practical also what's not all that practical is just what i call a really cool design so a lot of higher end motherboards actually look pretty cool and i will hand it to a lot of the motherboard manufacturers they have designers who are designing not just for function but also for form now because a lot of people pay attention to that as they build their own computer i've looked at plenty of budget entry-level motherboards and you looked at them and they're like uh you know it looks okay but it's not that great the higher end you get though the more beefy and substantial motherboards look and uh there might be some pretty cool design elements there again something that i wouldn't necessarily recommend you pay a bunch more for but for some people they see a design and like oh my gosh that speaks to me that's what i need to put in my next system so that's why i place that in the middle category it might affect you it might not here are extras that in my opinion you should not be paying more for the first is high-end audio this is actually one of the selling points for a lot of different motherboards yes motherboard audio has improved and most motherboards have audio solutions that are perfectly adequate and even the high-end motherboards have audio solutions that are demonstrably better and they even start to get into crossover features like support for high impedance headphones and stuff like that in my opinion though if you really want to get into that audio file category and you're talking about using your computer as a source you should invest in a dac an external dac to be more specific they're probably going to cost you 200 or more but if you really want that audio file high-end experience you should remove the analog to digital conversion from the electrically noisy environment of your computer and put it separately somewhere else then you just connect via usb usb signals digital so it's not subject to interference and then you'll have a much nicer experience with your audio that's not to say that the integrated high-end audio is worthless in these uh more expensive motherboards it's just that if you're really getting into that stuff a dac is absolutely the way to go also an integrated led panel i kind of talked about that being sort of the fancier features here but they also have these led panels integrated that you're supposed that are supposed to display pertinent system information and stuff like that and in my opinion when it's attached to a motherboard sitting there back in the case with maybe a tinted tempered glass side panel in front of it and rgb leds going on and stuff like that it's just hard to see practically speaking it's difficult to actually get any useful information from those types of panels so for that solution i would advise getting a separate a little led panel which you can connect up via usb and control on your own via software a debug led is okay and i definitely approve and recommend of that but those more advanced panels i think are just not worth paying the extra money for the motherboard for finally anything less than a 10 gigabit nick you shouldn't be investing in the motherboard for because 10 gigabit knicks are easy to get a hold of and in my opinion going less than 10 gigabit is kind of cutting things down i was actually a little disappointed when i saw that the crosshair 8 formula did not have a 10 gigabit nick i have one last category which is actually useful features but useful features that are also potentially available on mid-range boards so these are features that i recommend you shop for but you don't necessarily need to pay 700 bucks in order to get i have a full video that i already did on this so i'll link that in the description if you want to watch that whole thing it's called my five favorite motherboard features but i'm just going to run down them really quickly first off surface mounted power and reset buttons very useful to have typically not found on your super budget or mid-range budget boards but once you get to the mid-range and higher that will often be something that's included an led post readout or debug led is usually a two-digit led readout that this that displays a code as your system is booting up useful for troubleshooting and then often after your system boots it will show your system temperature and since it's larger led numbers that's usually readable too uh the ability to flash your uefi or bios without a cpu or memory installed i think is just one of the most useful features it's called different things by different companies asus calls it usb bios flashback i think msi calls it bios flashback plus but that's really nice to have especially on the ryzen series motherboards because there's lots of new ryzen cpus that come out that are compatible with other older motherboards but you need to update the older motherboard in order to recognize the the new cpu another thing you might need while troubleshooting is a clear cmos button and having that externally on the rear i o panel is really helpful as well if you need to just reset the bios back to default so you can get back into it to adjust some settings or if you're going for an overclock that didn't work out that's really nice to have and finally those advanced fan controls most motherboards will have some level of this but advanced fan controls combined with more fan headers on the board will also give you more flexibility for setting up your fans the way you want to and also having a lot of them if you want lots of airflow to keep things nice and cool and all of those things can often be found on motherboards that cost around 200 bucks and that's still my recommendation most of the time and there is a reason that my motherboard recommendations for building a gaming pc tend to all be about in the one to two hundred dollar price range most people really just don't need much more than that unless you're devoting yourself to one of the more costly niches of pc building extreme overclocking or custom water cooling the extra features that a 700 motherboard provide often go unused or can be purchased separately as ad-hoc upgrades like a 10 gigabit nick or an m.2 pcie adapter if they are really needed but please don't feel bad if you've already gone out and bought a high-end motherboard that it's not really my intent with this video building your own pc is about choosing the parts that suit your needs or your aesthetic tastes best and if the board you've got your eye on has that perfect mix of looks and features and maybe one or two drool-worthy high-end things you can't go without then you should just go for it and be confident in your decision but that is gonna wrap it up for this video you guys and i'm very curious if there was anything i missed i tried to be pretty thorough and going over the features that are available on the current generation of high-end motherboards but maybe there's something in there that you were like oh my gosh i need that motherboard even if it's 600 bucks because it has this let me know what that thing is and what that motherboard is down in the comment section down below while you're down there of course in the description i'll put links to uh various things i've talked about today and links to websites and stuff like that also link to my store where you can buy stuff at paul's hardware dot net shirts mugs pint glasses to help support my channel and get yourself some super sweet merch if you want to hit the thumbs up button on the way out that is very much appreciated as well thank you very much for watching this video you guys and we'll see you in the next one\n"