Thursday, April 17, 2008

About Cheap Computer Motherboards

Motherboards that have various peripherals built into them are very popular these days and are a good buy. If you are not a high end gamer or you are not going to be setting up a sound studio, onboard audio is a good way to save a few bucks. The same goes for an onboard modem if you need a dial-up internet connection and onboard ethernet if you need networking for LAN.

In my personal and professional experience, motherboards that have most peripherals built into them work very well even for gamers unless you need a special feature. The exception to this rule is onboard is video. Even the famous ATI Radeon and nVidia Geforce GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) that are built onboard perform poorly.

If you use your computer mostly to surf the net and use office applications, onboard video is the way to go. If you are an avid gamer or you create video intensive media, you will want to use a faster, more powerful, add-in video card. You know who you are.

Warning: Be careful when buying a cheap motherboard like Biosta... I strongly advise purchasing a name brand motherboard. A cheaply built motherboard is not cheap; it will cost you later in frustration, heartaches, headaches and maybe even replacing it. An inferior motherboard can cause unexplainable system crashes, driver problems, the Windows "Blue Screen of Death" and a worthless warranty. Remember, the motherboard is the heart of your system and if you look around you can find a good name brand motherboard with all the bells and whistles for $100 or less.

My top 5 motherboard manufacturers are: ABIT, AOpen, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI. Not necessarily in that order. Choose your motherboard for features first and brand second. This is by no means a definitive list there many good motherboard manufactures.

No comments: