Buying a Motherboard - Up to Speed

So you have been through everything on your motherboard checklist and you have got a couple of boards in mind that you wish to consider purchasing. You might want one final thing to decide which of them is the best board for your money. The last thing I can offer as advice to buying a motherboard is the board's speed range.

Does your board allow you to upgrade your CPU at a later date to a faster one. You can tell this by the motherboards manual saying what speeds it supports by looking at what Bus speeds and clock multipliers it can do. Also this is important if you are interesting in overclocking.

It is always wise to have room for upgrade as it will save you money in the long run. The best way to do this is to choose a motherboard that includes your CPU in its lower half of its speed range and so has plenty of available speed if you want to upgrade to a new and faster CPU.

Again if you have IDE hard disks it may be wise to have a motherboard that supports S-ATA as well which gives you an easy upgrade option such you wish to step up to S-ATA. Also with graphics cards, if you have an AGP graphics card you will need a motherboard with an AGP port but a motherboard that also has a PCI express slot as well gives you the option again for an easy upgrade.

So there is a lot to consider when buying a motherboard, you may have to compromise something in order to get a decent board, more than likely though there will be a board out there that suits everything that you need. Have a look at the product info page to see if any of the boards we have reviewed fit your needs.