motherboards

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.

AMD's new Piledriver processor uses the new FM2 socket. With their track record of maintaining compatibility across processors and sockets, how does this new mobo marry up?

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.

When a company like Asus slaps 'Deluxe' moniker on a motherboard you can be fairly confident in it being feature-heavy.

The Republic of Gamers (RoG) has come out firing on the Intel Z77 chipset once again with the Asus RoG Maximus V Formula.

Thunderbolt promises a hell of a lot, but the cost and shortage of compatible devices mean that early adopters might want to tread carefully.