Best Motherboards 2023: master of performance

The best motherboards as the foundation for your new computer. What you can and can’t do with your PC depends on its motherboard. It also tells you what parts to buy because not all PC parts work with all motherboards. If you have a good motherboard, you should be able to play games without worrying about the CPU and GPU for a few years.

If you want more things, you should expect to spend more money. This isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you don’t plan to get a new motherboard for a few years. Now we need to think about how motherboards will work in the future, which is the most important thing about them. If you’re in it for the long haul, make sure that the socket or chipset on the board can handle these high-end processors.

With AMD, the old AM4 socket and X570 chipset are finally being replaced by the new AM5 socket and either the B650 or X670 chipsets, which are used by Zen 4 CPUs. On the other hand, Intel’s 13th Gen CPUs work with the LGA1700 socket from the 12th Gen, so a Z690 or Z790 chipset will work just fine. Below we have mentioned some of the best motherboards.

What Is a Motherboard?

Most of the time, the motherboard is the biggest printed circuit board in a computer’s case. It moves electricity around and makes it easier for the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), and any other part of the computer’s hardware to talk to and with each other. There are many different kinds of motherboards, and each one is made to work with a certain type and size of computer.

Since different types of processors and memory are designed to work best with different types of motherboards, it is hard to find a motherboard that is compatible with every type of CPU and memory. On the other hand, hard drives work with most brands and types of motherboards and are usually compatible with a wide range of them.

Inside the case of a computer is the motherboard, which is where most of the computer’s parts and accessories connect. When it comes to tower computers, the most important part is the circuit board, which can be found on either the right or left side of the tower.

How does a motherboard work?

When you turn on your computer, the power supply sends power to the motherboard so that the computer can use it. The southbridge and northbridge sections use data buses to move data between themselves and between the other parts of the chipset. The northbridge is the part that connects the CPU, RAM, and PCIe to the rest of the computer.

After the RAM starts sending inputs to the CPU, the CPU “reads” the operations that the RAM is doing as output. Depending on the type of expansion card you have, after the data is written to the PCIe, it is either copied or moved to the expansion card. The southbridge component is in charge of how data gets to and from the basic input/output system (BIOS), the universal serial bus (USB), the serial advanced technology attachment (SATA), and the PCI bus.

Signals sent to the BIOS allow your computer to start up, and data sent to the SATA “wakes up” your optical, hard disc, and solid-state drives. The information on the SATA drives powers the video card, network card, and sound card.

Best Motherboards

Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Xtreme

All of the flagship-class Z790 motherboards have the best features and specs, but the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Extreme is the best value. You lose a couple M.2 sockets compared to more expensive boards, but this bird has everything else you could want and more and costs between $200 and $400 less than the competition. This is one of the best motherboards if you can buy.

The Z790 Aorus Extreme has 10 Gb Ethernet, 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4 ports, flagship-class audio, PCIe 5.0 GPU and M.2 support, overkill power delivery, and the high-end look you’d expect from a high-end board. MSI’s Z790 Godlike has a few more features, but it costs $400 more and is also bigger. Unless you don’t care about money, it’s hard to recommend to most people.

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ASUS ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming

The name of this motherboard is almost the same as that of another in this set, but the socket and chipset are very different. This Asus ROG Strix X670-E Gaming motherboard is made for AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors and is a good one. It has support for DDR5 RAM, PCIe 5.0, and the new AM5 socket, just in case.

The 18+2 stage power design is great for overclocking your CPU, especially if you plan to use an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU that is not an X model. The newer PCIe 5.0 standard can be used in both of the full-size x16 PCI slots. Both of the x16 slots are protected, and most of the M. Two slots also work with PCIe 5.0, so you can add faster parts to this PC in the future. This is one of the best motherboards.

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MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk WiFi

Most of the time, best motherboards get high marks. They tend to focus on a core set of features rather than the high-end features that are common on boards that cost a lot more. If you don’t care about bells and whistles but still want something that can run a demanding Core i9 13900K CPU, you’ll probably be looking at Tomahawk models.

The MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk Wi-Fi, as the name suggests, is part of MSI’s second-tier sub-brand MAG. It’s between the Pro range and the MPG and MEG high-end ranges. At $319, £337, or AU$569, it’s not cheap, but compared to the prices of some high-end boards, it’s not too bad. But there is a lot of competition from other sellers in the same price range.

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Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Ultra

The Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Ultra is one of the best motherboards that work with Intel’s new 12th-gen Alder CPUs. It looks industrial with its dark grey and silver finish, which is a change from the Z590 model that came before it. The board can handle up to 128GB of DDR5 6200(O.C.) memory, and the main PCIe x16 slot comes with PCIe gen 5, making it future-proof.

There are also a total of four M.2 slots and six SATA ports, so there is a lot of storage space on the inside. Gigabyte has used a 19-phase setup for the VRMs, with 16 phases dedicated to Vcore. There are also 105A Renesas SPS MOSFETs and finned heatsinks for the VRM, as well as two large heatsinks for the top and bottom M.2 sockets.

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MSI MEG Z490 Godlike

High-end best motherboards may cost a lot, but if you have something like the MSI MEG Z490 Godlike, you’re pretty much guaranteed top-notch performance, especially if you have Intel parts. As long as you don’t mind paying the price.

In fact, we’d go so far as to say that this is the best z490 board on the market right now. It has an excellent thermal solution, amazing overclocking performance, easy installation and diagnostic tools for do-it-yourselfers, and a solid build.

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