It used to be that choosing a motherboard was a very stressful process because choosing the
wrong one could mean a serious impact on your system's performance. But these days, it seems
like a common piece of advice is to buy the cheapest thing that has the CPU support and the
ports that you want. But hold on, there is still a huge amount of variation in motherboard pricing.
It's not uncommon to see a range from around 50 bucks to 500 dollars on major retail sites.
So what exactly are you getting for all that extra money? First off, you may have noticed that the
more pricey motherboards tend to be girthier, heftier, and a huge reason for this is that oftentimes
the actual circuit board that all the components are soldered onto is thicker. A thick PCB has an
obvious advantage. It makes the board more durable and less likely to bend and flex when you're
installing it into your case or performing upgrades, which could damage the sensitive components housed
But there's also an advantage you cannot see. Greater PCB thickness means there's more room
to embed the electrical traces that connect all the different components, meaning not only can a
thicker motherboard contain thicker traces to carry more power, it can have more layers which
can allow manufacturers to implement faster technologies that require more complex trace designs.
As we get newer standards in the tech world that support higher speeds, they often have to be built,
physically built, more stringently. Think about how moving data at 10 gigabits per second over
Ethernet requires a more complex cable built to tighter tolerances than moving just 1 gigabit per
second. And motherboards can be similar. For example, AMD announced in 2019 that the new
PCI Express 4.0 standard would not be supported by older chipsets. Not because it was impossible,
but rather because many of the motherboards featuring those chipsets weren't designed
with the PCIe Gen4 data rates in mind. The rates, people. The rates. Some boards might be constructed
robustly enough to handle those higher speeds, but other cheaper options were barely good enough to
carry a PCIe 3.0 signal. A thick motherboard also gives designers more room to separate different
circuits more effectively to cut down on interference. This is especially true for integrated audio,
where putting more physical space between the audio components and the rest of the motherboard
could often give you a cleaner sounding final product. More expensive motherboards,
very generally speaking, are also constructed with features designed to increase their lifespan
and can be subjected to more rigorous quality assurance testing. Not only will electrical
components like chokes and capacitors be made of higher quality materials, but they'll also
typically have better cooling solutions for hot components like voltage regulator modules.
Hence the beefy looking heat sinks you often see sitting right above the CPU socket on nicer models.
Speaking of chokes, price your motherboards typically have more of them, which usually
means that the power delivery to the CPU is spread out among more phases. This helps to
stabilize power delivery and provide more power to the processor than a cheap board is able to.
Now, this used to be very important in achieving high overclocks, but these days even lower cost
motherboards can deliver some very good overclocks. If you're really trying to push your CPU and squeeze
every last megahertz you can out of your silicon, a higher quality board can still be helpful,
but not only because of the hardware. Luxury motherboards often offer more features that you
can't see. Overclock or centric boards will get extra attention to those features from the
firmware engineers, and the list of little extras is actually quite long. Like having a backup BIOS,
the ability to flash firmware without a CPU installed, diagnostic readouts, and more user
configurable options, and a more powerful audio amplifier, reinforced expansion slots, and more
ports and headers, RGB lighting, etc. Back to the original question though, is all this stuff
worth it? Well, while a pricey motherboard might be built well enough to support additional features
through the use of add-on chips and give you slightly more overclocking headroom, we'd say that
you really need a pretty specific reason for venturing into the upper price tiers. If you're
looking at a cheap motherboard, it most likely is going to give you virtually the same raw performance
as a more expensive one as long as it's built to spec. So check out reviews and make sure,
above all, you're choosing something reliable. Then, if you have a special need for something
like a ton of fan headers, or if you're planning to use the motherboard for a really long time,
like more than five years, you can look at spending extra in those cases. And we'd never
judge you if you're paying more just because you're really serious about having a vaporwave-themed
build. Who's to say? So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up,
hit subscribe, and make sure to hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for
topics that we should cover in the future.