Thread: How to choose a new motherboard

I am about to upgrade to a new core 2 duo and need to find a motherboard that will support it. I have found one or to I like but I wanted to see what motherboards people recommended. It needs to have 2 PCI- E x16 slots, a LGA 775 CPU socket with 1333FSB or over and at least 2 DDR2 ram banks. If you know of a really good/reliable motherboard with these or better specs please let me know. I was looking to spend around 100-200 dollars.

Do the 2 PCI-E x16 slots both need to be full x16 bandwidth or can one of the m be x8? What is the max video card you expect to have on it - in terms of today’s cards? It makes a significant difference in what boards cost and which you can consider.
Another key question is if you want to graphics cards - do you know if it will be NVIDIA or AMD or do you need one that supports both? That can make a huge difference in which board to go with.
At this point DDR3 prices have dropped enough that I think you should try to stick with it for its advantages and future proofing - although I did include some DDR2 motherboards below. Also I strongly encourage getting at least 4 memory slots to make it easier to add another two sticks in a couple of years as more memory will be needed then.
You might find these reviews of groups of boards informative - if nothing else they will help you understand that different boards have different feature sets so what is the best board depends in part on your preferences.