Motherboards

A serious motherboard for serious overclocking, but is it an essential for your rig or one for the elite enthusiasts?

The wheel of time turns and chipsets come to pass, and a year after the Z77 chipset's launch, you can pick up top-spec boards for a fraction of the price you could just a few months back.

UPDATED A specs list longer than Methuselah's beard

A reasonably priced and feature-packed motherboard that performs well and shows some intelligent design choices.

Motherboards are dull. Decide the specs you need, compare on price and, maybe, take branding and reputation into account, and pull trigger. It's that simple.

The mini-ITX form factor has been around for a while, but it wasn't until the Sandy Bridge crowd tipped up that we started to see some lovely-looking, teeny-tiny motherboards worth a damn.

And in the Asus corner...

UPDATED This is the top Z77 board from Gigabyte, and has pretty much everything a full-spec mobo should.

The Intel H77 chipset is the little brother to the beefier Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset, and when we're talking about the P8H77-I we really do mean little.