how can i tell which is the best motherboard?

Question

what do all the letters and numbers mean

Answer 1

There are at least a few of things you need to consider. What speed/type CPU you want/have (MHz, DuoCore, Pentium 5 etc), what brand CPU you want/have (AMD vs. INTEL) what kind of RAM you want/have.

After that you have to consider how much you want to pay. The cheapest can sometime be the worst as far as quality, but the most expensive are not necessarily the best quality. So you have to kind of look around to see what you can afford from what is available. Then you can try doing a search for that model online to see if there are any forums that rate them or say whether they suck or not.

Answer 2

You need to determine what you need from your motherboard. Do you need PCI? AGP? PCI-Express? Do you need RAID support? Are you using an IDE or SATA hard-drive? Will you need onboard ethernet, video, and sound? Or a modem? What kind of processor? What form-factor?

If you don't know what the letters and numbers mean, you have a lot of homework to do before you can decide what's "best" for you. There is no "best" motherboard -- figure out what your needs are, find out what motherboards support what you need and compare them by reviews, price, etc.

Check out: http://www.newegg.com for motherboards of all brands with lots of customer reviews. You might also check out http://www.pricewatch.com for hardware of all sorts.

Answer 3

Base your motherboard on the type of processor, amount of ram, and amount of expansion slots you want. An Asus brand is popular for video game players.

Answer 4

Read reviews at websites such as this:
http://www.motherboards.org/

Answer 5

read this:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,102509,00.asp