Another crying for help building a PC thread. Enter please :)

[Squilliam]

eggs2see said:

Squilliam said:

I suspect that a motherboard like that may very well be overkill. What extra capabilities does one get for spending an extra 130% over top of getting 4 ram slots, a PCI-E slot and a decent quantity of USB and SATA ports?

In any case with lower resolution comes a reduced need to spend money on the graphics card. Whilst CPUs scale to the software, GPUs scale to both software and the number of pixels they have to render the graphics for.

Mostly for the sli, but a good motherboard will generally come with better quality parts meaning it will run cooler, more efficient and last longer.  That being said unless you are going to sli yeah that motherboard is really overkill.  All the same, the motherboard is really important and shouldn't be over looked.

I would say that $100 AUD is a quality product. You can get much cheaper boards for $50-60 AUD so that represents an almost 100% increase over the bare minimum. I suspect the high end motherboards have very large margins for both the retailer and manufacturs/chipset makers which really only pads the pockets of the companies which make them. The board I listed had 100% solid state japanese capacitors etc so I don't see any obvious areas for quality improvement.