It would depend hugely on what I needed it for, what features I expected/needed, and how highly I valued them.
For instance, these days I'm no longer a heavy gamer, so those high-end, feature-laden boards just aren't worth it for me. But I have, in the past, paid substantial sums for multi-processor “workstation” class boards, because I had a need.
The same, by the way, goes for graphics boards. In the past, I topped out at over £1200 for a graphics board. Now? I doubt I could justify topping £200, and even that would be pushing it.
At current prices my limit is around the £160 my present motherboard cost, last August.
I no longer overclock, as I no longer see any need. I don't need built-in high performance wifi as I use a usb adaptor I set up high where it works best. I don't a sound upgrade as I use an external DAC and headphone amp, good enough to make my old Asus Xonar Essence STX sound poor.
Paying more than I did last year, just means paying for features I will never use.
Probably about £250-300 but that's more to do with it being the price to get what I want on the board than a ‘fixed limit’.
I have in the past paid more (and that's before you consider inflation) but that was for a dual processor board etc.
£200 max, not much point in overclocking anymore so I think that should be enough to spend on a board tops.
For my main rig at this moment in time; less than £100 and probably closer to £50.
For what I need the board to do, that is support a single CPU at stock, two sticks of RAM, a graphics card and one M.2 NVME drive, there's nothing a £50 board can't do that a £250 can.
I just bought a new board recently @ 135euros which I thought was enough to spend but would probably have gone to 150 if I thought it was worth it.
£100 probably? The ones selling for £500+ boggle the mind.
£400, because I did but it would have to have unique features for that kinda cash
First enough for the form factor, then the socket, then the features. So mostly the best itx board for the chip I want to get
I don't have a price I'd pay, I have a feature set I am for and swallow the price. Back in the day I'd pay extra for SLI, extra IDE, and then, SATA ports, and this typically ended up as a mid-to-high-end option, around £200. Nowadays though I no longer need SLI, and there are more than enough slots for drives as standard, so a basic board does the job. It's just that basic board is still going to be around £200! But eh, I'm perfectly fine with that. M.2, PCIe4, SATA drives, tons of various USB3 ports, they're absolutely magnificent at even the most entry level…entry.
probably £400, rocking a X470 Crosshair VII at the moment, and that does for my 3900X…
About £100 I guess, I like offers though :)
My current board is the most expensive I have ever had at £160 and that was with a substantial reduction!! Prices for pc components, especially gpu's, are just getting ridiculous now.
approx $120GBP and thats for an itx board (which should include wi-fi) not averse to purcahing s/h or amazon warehouse .
As with many other commenters, it's more to do with the features than the price. As I've never had any problems with Asus boards, a Prime Z-390A at ≲£180 was what I ended up paying for my current one.
If the price had been over £250, I think I would have started dropping features, but that didn't come into it so I can't say for sure.
Starting to compare boards from other manufacturers too would be unnecessary extra cogitation.
€160… more than that is a waste of money.
AndyM2012
…..
As I've never had any problems with Asus boards, a Prime Z-390A at ≲£180 was what I ended up paying for my current one.
….
Starting to compare boards from other manufacturers too would be unnecessary extra cogitation.
Though I didn't think to say it, that's a very good point.
Though not having had problems previously isn't a guarantee (as sometimes, companies cut cists and trade on their name and reputation) it is still a strong plys point, and I will certainly pay a premium for that element of peace of mind.
Putting tgat another way, once I find a product/company giving me good service at a decent price, I can be quite hard to coax away from them and certainly, on high-priced products, I go with what I know and trust.
On the other hand, if's it's a box of cornflakes (etc) I'll cheerfully try a cheaper non-major brand ditch the brand name if I like them … or can't tell the difference.
200€ is the max I'm willing to pay for a motherboard and even at that price I feel I like I'm being ripped off.
Motherboard is an item I skimp on. 80 quid tops.
The most I ever paid was something that equates to ~£220 today for a Gigabyte 890GX board that lasted me about 7 years, but had a lot of ports and slots I never used. On the other hand, I switched to mini-ITX for my last build and got a nice little ASRock for cheap. I looked for upgraded sound and built-in wifi instead of lots of ports, and got a B450 with those things for ~£60 as an addon when buying a CPU. I think after successfully trying mini-ITX, I might be willing to pay a premium for something even smaller and less power-hungry (and maybe DC-in), but otherwise the market would have to change a lot for my next board to be over ~£100.
Not quite sure. My new build was £90, my previous one was £140 with a free cooler. Don't particularly want to pay much more than that. I may pay more on a future build if the specs make sense.
I'd probably be looking at around the £170 ish mark, since I (possibly wrongly) assume that the VRM phases would be better in motherboards around that price, and would provide a little more headroom for things like overclocking. I got a relatively cheap motherboard last time I did a full build, but I regret it since I found vdroop was a major issue when attempting even a tiny overclock. Even at stock, and eventually through undervolting to make my CPU nice and ‘low-power’, the difference between the vcore setting in the BIOS, what I get at idle in Windows, and then what I get at full load, is huge. I initially thought it was due to much higher power requirements of overclocking, but after undervolting and therefore lowering the potential peak power usage alot, and still seeing the big differences, I realised that the quality of the power circuitry on my motherboard just wasn't good enough to achieve a reliable and consistent value. I know all motherboards will probably suffer from vdroop to varying degrees, but again I *assume* that the better quality the motherboard, the less likely that will be an issue - please do correct me if I'm wrong, as I wouldn't want to waste my money. I.e. if the difference between a £100 and a £170 ish motherboard is too small to see any benefit?
I'd say probably £120-£150 depending on features. With the way prices are climbing I'd say I'd probably cap my next mobo's price at 50% of the price of the CPU I'm putting into it.
Back in 2014 I paid AU$699 for an Asus Rampage V Extreme, Was ludicrous back then as it is now.
I am seeing ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero WiFi Motherboard for AU$649 and the Strix 570E for AU$499.
Would probably drop down to the Strix board on next build, Put the extra few hundred saved toward a higher capacity 2tb m.2 for main boot drive. The Rampage V was overkill, Just a gamer these days and can't be stuffed with OC'ing.
AU$600 probably the limit for me on MB.
I broke my own rule with my current motherboard, the Crosshair VI Hero for $254. I will not do that again. My limit is $229. Anything higher isn't worth it to me. Except this board is very good. That's why the current gen asus x570 series made me angry. It's breaks all my price limits. Even though the Tachi x570 is one of the ugliest boards ever made. I would switch to that instead of Asus. Asus has burned a lot of bridges with me and I'm done with them. MSi and Gigabyte are also on the list. They are all pretty overpriced though. My knew goal will likely be to wait for amd/asus to release a non broken pos bios and get a 3700x on a sale.
Have just bought a new system and my budget wasn't large….
So the mobo was £76.99. And that was right for this build….
I'd think about an X570 board if I had a better budget but at the moment needs must!
So to answer the question - at this moment in time £200 is the upper limit for me
Depends on your CPU. Personally, I think there's no point buying a £500 motherboard if you have a 9600K for example. Spending that money on upgrading other parts of your system is much the better option. It's up to you. Just go for a motherboard with all the features you need. Don't be scared of going budget, just consult reviews to make sure you get the best for the price.
Well in euro I think about 250 to 300 max.
I have a crosshair vii and that's about the most I will spend
£200. The motherboard would have to be truly exceptional for me to consider anything more, and it wont be much more.
Depends on the build
bog standard office machine - £50 to £80
Gaming/streaming machine - probably £150 - £200
I built an office machine with an MSI arctic thingummy 3 years ago, I used it for testing transfer rates between SSD's on virtual machines for a uni project (measuring virtual overhead and so on) before consigning it to a general workhorse. 3 weeks ago the USB failed, both on the headers and on the case. Did all the usual testing, it was enabled in bios (once I dug out an old PS2 keyboard)but nothing was powered or operation even at POST, so something was wrong at the mobo level.
tried to replace with exactly the same mobo, was still over £100
£35 gigabyte board later and machine works fine - no bells and whistles but still fine
bit annoying as I wanted that machine to test a couple of graphics cards and cant do that now
very annoyed with MSI tho, wont be buying more of their stuff- Asus or Gigabyte for me
I think it entirely depends on what I'm building the PC for, what the budget for the build is overall and who I'm building the PC for, which defines the price I'm prepared to pay for the motherboard. My own current build it was ~£250, but more recently for another PC it was ~£97. Also depends on the warranty as well, I'm prepared to pay a little more if the warranty is good and the manufacturer has a good RMA process in place.
I would pay at least £1,000,000.69 for the ultimate motherboard.
I demand someone makes it.
Seriously though, mobo pricing is getting a bit daft right now. I think the gradual decline in PC sales has meant they're all trying to see just how far they can gouge customers.
I feel like this question has been brought about by the X570 chipset, but as we're seeing, the price premium is there for things like PCI-E 4.0 and 2.5G ethernet. The X470 chipset works perfectly fine with the Ryzen 3000-series CPUs and should be seen as the cheaper option.
The X570 motherboards are only expensive because they offer something that is brand new.
Having said that, I'd probably pay about £250-£300 for a motherboard but I'd expect decent audio, good VRM cooling and plenty of USB ports on the back.
MY current board was around £240 so I plan to spend less than £300.
it depends on the quality and how long it would last really here…. if it means it would be topnotch in 5 years time or more still being at the highest standards then price is not relevant here, it mean if gonna be the same value as something I need to pay per 3 years for a couple of times… alsways make sure when you buy equipment to look out for on the game front on what consoles there is and what consoles is coming close by… if Playstation 5 is about to be released make sure your gear is better than that to keep up to date with games. etc.
I would have to answer “what have I paid”. The first and only dual processor setup that I have built, used a Supermicro motherboard, which used twin Xeon 5470's. The motherboard was about £400 (today about £525) which pales into insignificance to the £1100 plus for each processor, which you can buy on Ebay today for less than £40. Mind you when I first booted up, there was a thrill in seeing 8 cores present. I still have it somewhere, stored under the eaves with all the rest of the redundant kit.
Depents on the features. I would not pay a single dime for wifi, lights and other silly stuff like that, put I would be willing to pay for good architecture, quality and speed. I would probably pay at most 200£ for a board that I like.
Mr_Jon
Motherboard is an item I skimp on. 80 quid tops.
I'm with this view as well. Never get the most power sapping CPUs and rarely use anything beyond the most basic functionality of the motherboard anyway. Given you can spend 3 times that amount on one you're certainly not getting 3 times the performance!
It really depends on the feature set. I wouldn't pay extra for gimmicks such as RGB. Looking at the motherboard line up it seems that in order to get triple M2 you have to have wifi as well. Didn't seem that long ago that £100 was top end board and that is barely budget board now.
I think my current Intel board was less than £200.
For less than £200 you can get dual M2, Intel lan, 64gb ram support. I wouldn't really pay more for 128gb support as I don't see any need for that. my PC is mostly used for gaming and I intend to get a server soon for any virtualization needs.
Some of the prices for amd ryzen boards seem crazy. I see that some of the boards have 2.5g and 5g ethernet. I can't find a single 2.5g or 5gb switch.
microtik do a 4 port SFP+ 4 port 10gb switch and netgear do a nighthawk switch with 2x 10gb ports.
When I finally upgrade I will be glad to have more than 4 cores. I went from a Q6600 to 4700k. so 4 cores 4 threads to 4 core 8 threads.
Originally tempted to go for the 12 core 24 threads but not sure it is really worth it.
My PC is still performing well. Got my current pc in 2013. only had two upgrades last year. 1080ti and 1tb sata ssd.
Expectations have changed.
Not too long ago NVMe drives were priced way above what I considered reasonable, and I considered SATA “quick enough”.
With the price decline of both SATA and now some NVMe drives around SATA levels, I am for the first time considering not just an NVMe drive, but in the future a board supporting more than 1 of them.
After watching the video from Buildzoid, I would say around £200 is as much as most would need to spend.
Few would benefit from spending more.
Opps, I meant to type $125-225 maximum
Expecting my next board to be around £250 or so. More than I expected to spend? Yep, but I guess that's progress.
Just want to know when the X570 ITX boards are going to make an appearance. I know there's a Gigabyte jobby over at Scan, but that's not what I'm looking for.
I rarely have a stab at a game so thats not important at all. I have a general rule of thumb and aim for a maximum of £125 for each main component , that is MB , Chip , Graphics, memory. I waited for prices to settle , especially memory as it was absurd for a while. Just finished new build , costs were….
Ryzen5 2600 £122
MSI B450 Pro Carbon £120
GSkill 16GB TridentZ RGB £114
Sapphire 570 Nitro+ 8GB £ 92 (second hand ) OTT for me but had a silly moment and succumbed. lol
max 250 £ I wating a bit tho….
i'm not telling a forum affiliated with a shop what im willing to pay for a product they sell. It'd be like shooting myself in the foot…
Never paid more than £80 for mobo on my main gaming pc and my target would be as near to £50 as possible. Had many a decent o/c on a sub £60 mobo but that's pretty much a thing of the past anyway, with Ryzens that now run so close to their limits out of the box.
Current motherboard prices look insane to me, so I may well be buying s/h for my next build (that'll probably be in 2022/23 ish) if the supply of decent budget boards dries up permanently (abit I miss you so…).
My current board is a X470 Asus Prime Pro which is the most I've ever spent on a motherboard, I only bought it because I couldn't wait for B450…for future purchases my max would be around £150.
I'm good for up to $150.00 US,…no more.
That said, I have a few friends that review products all of the time and they're usually willing to give me a real good deal on parts. (so my money goes a long way)