Computer components are one of those things you don’t really want to cheap out on if you can avoid it. You buy a cheap fan or a cheap hard drive, and a year later, you’re hearing rattling and clicking sounds.
The need to avoid cheap components often results in PC builders—especially gamers and other enthusiasts—overspending unnecessarily on some components, and nowhere is this more obvious than with motherboards.
Expensive Motherboards Don’t Add Much for Most People
Motherboards all do the same basic thing: they allow all of your components to communicate with each other, and they usually have a few dedicated components built in, like a sound card, Ethernet adapter, or Wi-Fi.
So what do you get when you buy a premium motherboard? These days, there are four functional things you’re going to see on premium motherboards.
There are usually some other, more cosmetic things too, like LCD screens on the motherboard itself or extra RGB headers.
Take theROG Crosshair x870E Extreme, one of the more expensive consumer motherboards out there. It has three PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, two USB4 USB-C ports,tenUSB 3.2 3x1 ports, Wi-Fi 7, and 10Gb Ethernet. It also costs 1,000 dollars.
Those specs are certainly impressive, but they’re completely unnecessary for most situations.
Consider just the Ethernet adapter. 10Gb Ethernet is helpful if you’rerunning an advanced homelabor other home server, but 10 gigabit internet service is still very rare. Unless you have it, you’re paying a premium on something you can’t use.
FivePCIe M.2 ports—especially ones that fast—are also an extremely expensive addition, and they’re even more expensive to use. For example,Crucial’s T705 PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDcosts 170 dollars for a 1TB drive, which is normal for a device in that class. to actually use those three slots, you’d need to spend a minimum of 510 dollars. Then you need to populate your two other PCie 4.0 M.2 slots. Those drives run about 100 dollars per terabyte.
Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek
Of course, you could happily plug in slower and less expensive PCIe M.2 drives into those slots, but then, once again, you’ve wasted money on a premium you’re not actually using.
It is nice to have a few high-speed USB ports on your PC, whether they’reUSB4or Thunderbolt, but ten 10 gigabit USB ports?
I might find that useful if I’d decided to completely omit any internal storage and was booting exclusively from USB devices, but otherwise, that is massive overkill. If you need that much bandwidth, you’re better off investing in something more specialized, like a PCIeThunderbolt card that gets you up to 120Gbpsin one port and then pair it with an appropriate dock.
Less Expensive Motherboards Have Everything You Need
Cheaper motherboards, on the other hand, are much less over-the-top, and they mostly contain features you’ll actually use.
Most mid-range current-gen motherboards will come with at least one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, and you’ll usually have a mix of PCIe 4.0 M.2 ports and at least one PCIe 4.0 x16 slot to boot.
Consider theASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WIFI. It has one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, one PCie 4.0 x16 slot, Wi-Fi 7, 2.5Gb Ethernet, one USB 3.2 2x2 port, three USB 3.2 2x1 ports, four USB 3.2 1x1 ports, and costs 220 dollars.
You won’t be able to use 5 PCIe M.2 SSDs, you won’t have 10 gigabit Ethernet, and you don’t have USB 4, but you will (with this example) have an extra 760 dollars to spend elsewhere.
What You Could Buy Instead
Not every motherboard costs as much as the ROG example I picked, but the point stands regardless: once you get above mid-range motherboards, the features you get drive up cost dramatically, and even most enthusiasts will not actually be able to put them to use.
On the other hand, 760 dollars can go a long way if you spend it on something else:
Even if a 1000-dollar motherboard was never on the menu, a few hundred dollars between a mid-range motherboard and an upper mid-range motherboard can still easily bump you from a 5070 to a 5070 Ti, add one more monitor to your setup, land you a very nice pair of headphones, or a top-shelf mechanical keyboard. You coulddouble your RAM.
Computers aren’t cheap to build, and when building one, it is important to keep an eye on the features that’ll actually matter. I’d wager a massive number of 10 gigabit USB ports and a mind-boggling number of PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots won’t bring you the most enjoyment, or even the best productivity, if that is what you’re chasing.
