Stop Overspending on Motherboards

The motherboard is the easiest place in a PC budget to waste money, because the expensive ones look and sound important. For most gaming builds, the right board is the cheapest one from a solid mainstream line that has the ports you will actually use. With memory and graphics cards priced the way they are this year, the extra money has better places to go.

A bigger price does not mean more frames

A motherboard doesn't make your games faster. At stock settings, frame rate comes from the graphics card, the processor and the memory, and the board's job is to connect them reliably.

Look at what the gap buys. In our motherboard catalog on November 9, the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero cost about three times as much as the MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi, and more than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D you might put in it. Both have Wi-Fi 7, 5Gb Ethernet and a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. The Hero adds two USB4 ports, one more M.2 slot and a heavier power design. That is a real list of upgrades, and in a gaming PC most of it will never be used.

The chipset changes less than the name suggests

AMD's own AM5 chipset table shows how little separates the mainstream tiers. B850 and X870 both allow CPU and memory overclocking, and both give you PCIe 5.0 for NVMe storage. X870 makes USB4 standard and adds PCIe 5.0 for graphics. AMD lists B850's graphics slot as PCIe 4.0, but every B850 board in our catalog has a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot anyway, so read the spec page for the exact model.

PCIe 4.0 x16 is plenty for a 16-lane graphics card. The exception is a card with only eight lanes and too little VRAM. In testing reported by Tom's Hardware, an RTX 5060 Ti 8GB ran slower on PCIe 4.0, and eight of 27 games lost almost 9 percent or more. That is a reason to avoid 8GB cards, and no reason to buy a costlier board.

Intel's split looks similar. Compared with Z890, B860 gives up CPU overclocking and some PCIe lanes and keeps memory overclocking. If you are not overclocking the processor, you probably won't miss either. Tom's Hardware also reports that LGA 1851 has no new processors coming, so flagship money on a Z890 board buys no upgrade path.

Future-proofing is the usual excuse, and on AM5 it doesn't hold up. The socket is what gives you the future, and AMD supports it through 2029. AMD says all AM5 boards work with all AM5 processors, with a BIOS update sometimes required. A mid-range board gets the same path as a flagship.

Power delivery is real, and usually already enough

A better VRM matters when a CPU pulls heavy power for a long time. Our scores reflect that, rating the Hero's power delivery at 9.3 and the Tomahawk Max's at 7.8. The question is whether your processor can use the difference.

A Ryzen 7 9800X3D tops out at 162 W in our catalog, well within what a mainstream B850 board is built for. A Ryzen 9 9950X can reach 230 W and a Core Ultra 9 285K 250 W, and if you run chips like those flat out for hours, spending more is justified.

When spending more is worth it

Pay up when you can name the thing you are paying for:

• You will use USB4 or 10Gb networking regularly.
• You need more M.2 drives than a mainstream board can hold.
• You run a 16-core processor under sustained load.
• You are building in Mini-ITX, where small boards carry a premium you can't avoid.
• You overclock for fun and accept that it costs money.

Also check today's prices before deciding on a tier. On November 9, the MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi cost less than 2 percent more than its B850 sibling, and at that gap the X870 is the better buy for its two USB4 ports, as long as you remember they share PCIe bandwidth with its second PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot.

Don't swing too far the other way

The very cheapest boards cut things you will miss. AMD's B840 and A620 chipsets drop CPU overclocking and PCIe 5.0 storage. Entry-level boards in our catalog also score noticeably lower on power delivery, and a board like the MSI PRO H810M-E has one M.2 slot and no Wi-Fi. Aim for at least two M.2 slots, a current BIOS and the rear ports you use every day. The builder will flag a BIOS or CPU support problem before you buy.

Where the savings should go

The price difference between the Hero and the Tomahawk Max covers most of a 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit. That is where your money goes further this year, followed by the next tier of graphics card. Start with how to choose a motherboard, see our motherboard rankings, and use the budget guide to divide the rest.