A motherboard is the piece of hardware that holds the rest of your PC together, enabling the processor to communicate with other critical components like memory (RAM) and storage. Its chipset handles many of the motherboard’s expansion slots, SATA connections, USB ports and sound/network functionality. Whether you’re looking for an inexpensive home PC or a high-performance data center workhorse, there’s an Intel motherboard to match your needs.
A modern CPU connects directly to RAM, where it fetches instructions from different programs, via traces (lines of conductive metal) on the motherboard that are called pins. Other important pins on the motherboard connect the CPU to expansion slots for performance-critical devices, such as graphics cards and hard drives. Modern Intel motherboards also use the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus for faster data transfer between the CPU, chipset and expansion slots.
While most newer AMD AM4 or Ryzen 7-series motherboards support the latest DDR5 memory, most of Intel’s Z, H and X class motherboards require DDR4 to take advantage of all the latest features and performance enhancements in its cores and GPUs. Fortunately, last-gen DDR4 is still affordable, cutting your build budget significantly.
Asus’ Z790 Nova Wi-Fi and Gigabyte’s Tomahawk are two of the best mid-range options to support Intel’s 14th Gen Core processors. Both offer plenty of extra features, including a plethora of M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD slots, front-panel 20 Gbps USB Type-C and integrated Wi-Fi 6E. But our favorite is ASRock’s Steel Legend, which boasts the most features for your budget at a sub-$350 price point. Intel motherboards
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