There are old sayings that tell us that a building is only as strong as its foundation, a tree only as strong as its roots. These adages can be applied to building a great gaming rig as well if we consider that a gaming computer is more than a CPU/GPU, RAM and a cooling system.
The fact is that you can have the best, most powerful components made today, and still have problems overclocking if your motherboard is not up to the task at hand.
We all have this problem at one time in our lives.
The problem comes from marketing by companies like Nvidia and Intel. The motherboard is the circulatory system of a gaming computer and if build quality is not up to scratch you will inevitably hit bottle necks with your overclocks, prematurely hitting the brick wall without hitting your components full potential. But while we see advertisements for the new Intel i7 or the new AMD Radeon HD 8000 video card, unless you are shopping in one of the modding magazines or websites, we never see many advertisements for gaming motherboards, even though they most certainly exist manufacturers have realized the big money is in the general consumer market instead of the hardcore pc modding scene.
Your CPU is the brain of your computer and the motherboard is the heart, if you needed heart surgery you would not skimp on health insurance would you? this is the same principle. Invest in a quality motherboard and you will be rewarded with a system that is more in sync, able to hit higher CPU overclocks, provides a plethora of bios options which ultimately put more control in your hands and infinitely more stable.
SLI on an AMD Motherboard
One excellent example is the AM3 Motherboard, Asus M5A99X Evo. This new pc motherboard is guaranteed to work at optimum with the new Bulldozer line of CPUs that AMD has slated for release. While there are other, older and less expensive boards that can also handle the Bulldozer when it is released the 990 series will have USB 3.0 port, SLI support (which allows you to use Nvidia cards in an AMD board) and the 990FX boards allow you to run two x 16 slots at PCIe x16 speeds.
Intel Motherboard with Crossfire Support
The Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H, LGA 1150 Motherboard is another example of a cross-platform motherboard. This board permits both SLI and CrossfireX support, has two USB 3.0 ports, 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, duel NICS, surface mounted power and reset buttons Creative Labs X-FI MB drivers and a dual-BIOS setup which is a trademark of Gigabyte and has been redesigned and improved, making for a very flexible and robust motherboard. When the board was bench tested the GA-Z87X-UD5H, LGA 1150 showed a distinct advantage in several benchmarks.
The days when we had to find the right video card interface for the right motherboard is a thing of the past and PC hardware is beginning to catch back up with the code, when 64-bit computer processors were first released we didn’t even have 64-bit operating systems that were worth uninstalling Windows XP for and the same was true for Dual-core technology – we had no way to utilize it.
These new motherboards are retailing for less than $300 and for a reasonably small investment could easily save you hundreds of dollars later when you have to replace a flaky motherboard. The truth is that unless you have a solid foundation your gaming system is much like the Volkswagen Beetle with a Rolls Royce hood ornament. But if your base can handle powerful components you will have the flexibility to expand at leisure and push the overclocking boundaries