I have always used cheaper motherboards due to me not needing the bells and whistles.
I have a Soundblaster Z dedicated sound card so could care less about a sound chip on the mobo, I have 2 SSD's and a 1 TB HDD so I don't need like 6-8 6GB/s sata ports, I also don't need like more than 2 USB 3.0 ports in the back nor do I see myself using SLI/XFire in the near future. I usually stick with a higher end single GPU solutions, although that option would be nice for the future down the road but I don't think that option is worth more than a $10 premium in my eyes.
Now I do plan on overclocking my CPU/GPU. I know some boards do better than others but if its a 100-200mhz difference on the cpu for like $50 more then I think it is hardly worth the value. I am looking for the best bang for buck here.
I am going to MicroCenter in a short while to pick up a mobo/cpu combo and plan on getting a 3670k. Now there is a considerable spread in price in the mobo combos. Link:
http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx
Now under the mobo combo the MSI and the Asus on the lower end of the price caught my eye and are the two choices I am contemplating. My budget I set myself for about the best price/performance ratio was ~$300.
How are MSI motherboards? I've only ever used Asus/ASRock before and my current mobo is an ASRock that crapped out on me after ~3 years.
I have a Soundblaster Z dedicated sound card so could care less about a sound chip on the mobo, I have 2 SSD's and a 1 TB HDD so I don't need like 6-8 6GB/s sata ports, I also don't need like more than 2 USB 3.0 ports in the back nor do I see myself using SLI/XFire in the near future. I usually stick with a higher end single GPU solutions, although that option would be nice for the future down the road but I don't think that option is worth more than a $10 premium in my eyes.
Now I do plan on overclocking my CPU/GPU. I know some boards do better than others but if its a 100-200mhz difference on the cpu for like $50 more then I think it is hardly worth the value. I am looking for the best bang for buck here.
I am going to MicroCenter in a short while to pick up a mobo/cpu combo and plan on getting a 3670k. Now there is a considerable spread in price in the mobo combos. Link:
http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx
Now under the mobo combo the MSI and the Asus on the lower end of the price caught my eye and are the two choices I am contemplating. My budget I set myself for about the best price/performance ratio was ~$300.
How are MSI motherboards? I've only ever used Asus/ASRock before and my current mobo is an ASRock that crapped out on me after ~3 years.