Summary
- Ensure your motherboard has sufficient fan headers to accommodate all your cabinet fans for better temperature control without increasing noise levels.
- Choose a motherboard that allows your high-speed RAM to run at its maximum clock speed to fully utilize its potential.
- Look for a motherboard with good-quality VRMs for improved stability and performance during CPU overclocking.
When you're thinking about purchasing a new motherboard, there are a handful of factors you should keep in mind. For one, the motherboard of your choice should be compatible with your CPU and memory. Likewise, it should have the correct form factor to fit inside your PC cabinet.
There are also several quality-of-life features that, although not essential, can make your life a lot easier. Having assembled my fair share of desktops, here are five features I look for in a motherboard.
5 Sufficient fan headers
To accommodate all your cabinet fans
Keeping your battle station of a rig at sufficiently low temps is a problem that every enthusiast has to deal with at some point in their PC-building journey. A simple way to tackle excessive thermals is to add more fans to your system — assuming your motherboard has enough fan headers to power them, of course.
While you can plug the cabinet fans directly into the PSU, doing so will run them at full speed, thereby reducing their lifespan in addition to increasing the overall noise level. Meanwhile, the 4-pin headers on modern motherboards allow you to control the fan speed using the BIOS or third-party apps like Fan Control. Sure, fan hubs and cable splitters can be a decent alternative, but in my experience, they tend to make cable management a real hassle. Most of the premium controllers also occupy a lot of space, which can be an issue if your PC has a small cabinet.
When I search for a new motherboard, I always check the specs sheet to make sure it has enough headers for my preferred fan configuration.
4 Maximum RAM clock speed
You want to run your high-speed memory at its full potential
Overclocking your graphics cards, processors, and other components has gotten much easier over the years, thanks to a host of first-party and third-party utilities. RAM sticks are no exception, with XMP/A-XMP profiles allowing you to boost your memory’s clock speed with just the click of a button.
However, not all motherboards are built the same. While premium motherboards like the Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero can hit 8000MHz on RAM overclocks, some of the cheaper options may cap your memory clock speed at 6400MHz. If you’re planning to make full use of your blazing-fast DDR5 memory kit, you should pick a motherboard that lets the memory run at its maximum clock speed.
3 Good-quality VRMs
For all your overclocking needs
The motherboard VRM may be of little or no interest to casual users, but it can be a deal-breaker if you’re a part of the overclocking community. For the uninitiated, VRM stands for Voltage Regulator Module, which controls the amount of power sent by the PSU to your CPU. A high-quality VRM can provide cleaner voltage to the processor, thereby improving the stability of CPU overclocks.
While the material used to build the VRM is pretty important, the number of power phases of a VRM is a good indicator of its quality: motherboards with a higher number of phases can divide the power load and heat more evenly, leading to better performance and reduced temperatures.
2 BIOS Flashback button
To simplify the BIOS firmware update procedure
With AMD and Intel updating their chipsets every CPU generation, you may run into issues when using a newer processor on an old motherboard. Flashing the updated BIOS firmware usually does the trick, but what if you can’t boot into BIOS settings in the first place? If the motherboard fails to detect the processor, your system may get stuck in a boot loop where it’s impossible to access the BIOS settings.
A dedicated BIOS Flashback button comes in really handy in such a situation, as it doesn’t require you to have a CPU or memory plugged into the motherboard when you're updating your BIOS. Moreover, this convenient button can even fix a corrupted BIOS, making it an absolute must in my book.
1 Debug LEDs
These are a godsend when troubleshooting your PC
For a PC that refuses to POST, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint the faulty component. Unless you have spare PC parts lying around, you’ll have to test all the components, including the PSU, RAM, and even the boot drive, to find out what went wrong with your system.
As someone who has been fixing PCs for years, I can testify that LEDs capable of displaying the defective component can single-handedly reduce the amount of time spent troubleshooting from hours to mere seconds. I’d go so far as to say that a user-friendly feature like debug LEDs should be included in every motherboard (but that’s a rant for another time).
Closing thoughts
This list is a great starting point for purchasing a new motherboard, but there are a couple of other factors that influence the type of motherboard I pick for my PC builds. With USB Type-C ports gaining popularity, I prefer motherboards that include these connections to avoid going through the trouble of buying PCIe expansion cards just to gain access to Type-C connections. Besides native Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, I also pay close attention to the number of RAM slots, IO connections, and PCIe slots before deciding.