How much did your motherboard cost?

[NTDaws]

Pay a premium for a better processor or graphics card, and there's a good chance you'll get better performance in return. Do the same when buying a motherboard, and the benefits may be harder to quantify. Generally speaking, motherboard pricing tends to be tied to features—be it extra Serial ATA ports, multi-GPU compatibility, overclocking options, or just the ability to use a freshly released processor.

That raises an important question: Was a simple LGA775 or Socket AM2+ motherboard with a lone PCI Express x16 slot enough, or did you go for a tricked-out Core i7 mobo with more heat pipes and connectors than your last three PCs put together? This happens to be my latest poll question, so feel free to cast your vote either above or comment below.

 

~Dawson Wehage

[Mr.Meerkat]

You're forgetting something, unless you're going with intel's consumer grade CPUs then you have to pay a premium for x99 motherboards  

[Lord Sephington]

I got my motherboard as part of a bundle on an extremely limited budget, i paid £100 for my bundle with AMD A6 6400K and 4gb DDR3 1600 ram so it kinda sucks

[paddy-stone]

Yeah, my new one coming in a few days cost me £160+ (approx $210), but TBH I only went that much because of features, this is the only itx board I could find that had a displayport 1.2 on board. Also has ac wifi/bluetooth and an intel NIC, so sick of seeing the e2200 killer ethernet. Only thing I wish was that every board now has mounting holes like enthusiast boards like x99. I hate backplates, ok they perform a function and it's great not to have the stupid intel pushpins... but really in this day and age they can't have this on every motherboard, come on!

I would've gone for x99, but would be losing I/O that skylake chipset has already like USB type C, 3.1, DPort and it would've cost more. If this build was for home use only, then I might've gone x99, but this build I have gone for a somewhat portable build in an m-ATX case and there's so little choice out there at the moment in this size for x99 and with I/O /features.

[SLAYR]

$180 for a used x79 board, it was worth it with a $50 e5 2670.

[gamerking]

600$ for Gigabyte GA-X99-SOC Champion that was with taxes think it was 400ish before taxes

[SteveGrabowski0]

$85 for my MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition board. I bought it mostly so I could use faster RAM and have a few extra SATA ports and so I could use my H81 board with my G3258 for an HTPC.

[SLAYR]

1 hour ago, gamerking said:

600$ for Gigabyte GA-X99-SOC Champion that was with taxes think it was 400ish before taxes

What country has 166% sales tax? 

 

If it is USD you can get that mothwrboard for $300.

http://pcpartpicker.com/product/g998TW/gigabyte-motherboard-gax99socchampion

[SpaceGhostC2C]

16 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

What country has 166% sales tax? 

 

600/400-1 = 50% tax. 

 

I'm not aware of any country with 50% sales tax or VAT (high 20s is the most I've seen), but he may have included import duties. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, Dawson Wehage said:

 

That raises an important question: how much did TR readers spend on their last motherboard (at the time of purchase)? 

What is a TR reader? 

 

In any case, around EUR 90. 

[RxL]

not sure on pricing so i selected over $400 as i paid £418 (Pound Sterling)

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I dropped about $165 for my ASRock Z97 Extreme6.  (It might have been a little less with a promo code, I don't remember, just going by my pcpartpicker list which lists promo codes separately.)

[Zusafek]

I can't comment on this one yet.  I still need to buy a new board and a new case.  Luckily I have the processor which I'm stealing off my current machine to put into my new build.

[tlink]

payed 160€ for the asus z170 pro gaming, great value board for the price. its enthusiast grade quality and features without the hefty price tag and leds thrown everywhere.

[DrMikeNZ]

I paid $519 USD equivalent for a $330 USD X99 motherboard.

[alpenwasser]

I think my SR-2 cost me about 700 USD back in the day. Then again, it was and still is a board which doesn't really have an equal. Still, not exactly the most pragmatic purchase I've ever made. But I just wanted one, and it is an awesome board, even today (it's about six years old now).

[Brennan Price]

So what if I paid only £35 for my Motherboard? I have all the features I need and I can overclock to 4.2GHz with ease. I seriously don't see why you need to spend so much and yes admittedly I do wish I had gone full ATX so I can use crossfire but I can just sell my current MB and other items etc. to get what I need.

[alpenwasser]

8 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

So what if I paid only £35 for my Motherboard? I have all the features I need and I can overclock to 4.2GHz with ease. I seriously don't see why you need to spend so much and yes admittedly I do wish I had gone full ATX so I can use crossfire but I can just sell my current MB and other items etc. to get what I need.

If you don't spend at least 75% of your yearly salary on your PC and sell one of your kidneys, you are obviously a heretic!

 

More seriously though, I think a lot of people around here (myself included) frequently buy not so much what they need, but what they desire. You are among the more pragmatic folks, nothing really wrong with that.

[Brennan Price]

1 minute ago, alpenwasser said:

If you don't spend at least 75% of your yearly salary on your PC and sell one of your kidneys, you are obviously a heretic!

 

More seriously though, I think a lot of people around here (myself included) frequently buy not so much what they need, but what they desire. You are among the more pragmatic folks, nothing really wrong with that.

 

Well, thanks, I guess. I have never really spent much on the motherboard on any of the PC's that I build tbh. They all seem to have exactly what I need at a fairly low price, so why pay more? In my mind it makes sense even if I do have to sacrifice an MB temp gauge or LED's but I'm not really bothered about it, I will just go out and buy those for much cheaper anyway. Probably from China  

[PaintChips]

Didn't like the idea of spending more than $200 but I added up the cost of separately buying SATA cables with an aftermarket audio card and it was cheaper to get the higher end Z170 & unlocked CPU... overkill for my needs since it supports SLI/Crossfire but it does provide plenty of expansion options such as dual-M.2 & Thunderbolt 3. Awkwardly recently opted to do a video project which needs an i7 so I'm now buying an unlocked i7 which means my old i5 will be rolling downwards to my Linux box which doesn't have an OC mobo, at least a high-end CPU isn't going to sit in a box unused    (that project I'm working on will foot the bill for a 512 GB M.2 SSD so at least I over-built my workstation beyond my original requirements)

 

Generally my budget always stuck with $100 max for a mobo, my i3 6100 Linux box uses a $80 board I got for $50 on sale(mobo+RAM bundle)--I didn't buy the CPU, a friend who's an Intel Solutions Provider wanted two spare PATA HDDs(30GB) for a vintage PC project so it was a great trade. That friend tried to bribe me with an i7 if I'd trade my Samsung Spinpoint PATA drives but we all know they're too good to give up