Sure if you have deep pockets and do not mind just throwing money at the problem you could probably find the right board in 60 seconds or less. If on the other hand you want some very specific things and you want to get a good price you can spend a day doing it. Lucky for me the wife had today off as well so I was free to just troll around on the internet looking for Motherboards for my new AM2 AMD CPU that is on it's way. Lucky for me I do not need the latest greastes Chip set this opens a lot of doors for models that are a year or two old but are other wise brand new and loaded with features. I think what is really anoying me is that while SATA and Raid are great I have plenty of old school stuff that I want to reuse so I still want a floppy controller and and at least on UATA IDE controller. I want at least 3PCI slots what do I need with a bunch of pcicx1 or pcix4 slots? Why do I need 6 SATA ports how many hard drives and optical drives do I need? Why would anyone use the latest greatest chip set but then only give the board the most rudamentry conectors and output devicese etc... Some of these high dollar boards only have 4USB ports no optial or coxial outputs only one video output so you had better have what ever they have ont hat board on your monitor and silly stuff. So far I think the dubest things I have seen are mobo's that have a killer chip set and are designed for some of the most powerful CPU's on earth built on a board so small that you can not put all the stuff on it that you would really want to use with a processor that powerful.
I have no idea how they arive at priceing either since it seems to be all over the place. The mobo's with the most features are not always the most expensive. It apears like the chipset has more to do with the price then the features of the board.
Then their is the quality control and customer service issues. It seems like some of the most expensive boards come with poor quality control and poor customer service. You can not even use price as an indicator of quality. A company might have one board that has nothing but great reviews then another one in the same family has nothing but negative reviews due to lots of failures or DOA's!
I almost miss the days before the internet was so popular and customer did not get to leave reviews since they can be so biased. You really ahve no idea if it was the boards fault or if they person doing the work was an not up to the job and did something stupid. i have seen people that keep their collection of mobo's in one large box with one mobo stacked on top of another or just lieing on the floor for the cat and dog to walk on etc....... I think the customer reviews are makeing very hard for me to settle on a mobo since so many of them are negative.
I have narrowed it down to Asus,Biostar,MSI and Gigabyte. I am mostly leaning toward MSI and Asus based on a combination of reputation,price and feature content.
I have no idea how they arive at priceing either since it seems to be all over the place. The mobo's with the most features are not always the most expensive. It apears like the chipset has more to do with the price then the features of the board.
Then their is the quality control and customer service issues. It seems like some of the most expensive boards come with poor quality control and poor customer service. You can not even use price as an indicator of quality. A company might have one board that has nothing but great reviews then another one in the same family has nothing but negative reviews due to lots of failures or DOA's!
I almost miss the days before the internet was so popular and customer did not get to leave reviews since they can be so biased. You really ahve no idea if it was the boards fault or if they person doing the work was an not up to the job and did something stupid. i have seen people that keep their collection of mobo's in one large box with one mobo stacked on top of another or just lieing on the floor for the cat and dog to walk on etc....... I think the customer reviews are makeing very hard for me to settle on a mobo since so many of them are negative.
I have narrowed it down to Asus,Biostar,MSI and Gigabyte. I am mostly leaning toward MSI and Asus based on a combination of reputation,price and feature content.