PCI slots on a motherboard
Micro ATX motherboards are more compact than regular-sized ATX motherboards. They usually have onboard video and audio, and they have two to three PCI slots. The type of motherboard you select for your computer will directly affect what type of processor you use, and will influence how your components communicate with one another. There are many quality boards out there if you know what to look for.
EVGA H55V
This motherboard was designed to be an affordable option for those who need to upgrade their OS from Windows XP to Windows Vista or 7. It supports Intel processors such as the Core i7-800, i5 and i3. Heating issues are minimized by using a passive chipset heatsink, reducing the need for noisy fans. This board's solid-state capacitors are designed to last. A simple and cost-effective motherboard, the EVGA is a sensible choice that will work with most of your existing components. You'll need a SATA or SATA II hard drive, though, as this board has no IDE ports.
ASUS Republic of Gamers Rampage III Formula
Gamers will recognize Intel's high-end x58 Northbridge/ICH10R Southbridge combination on this board, giving your graphics card up to 36 PCI-Express lanes to work with. You also get Triple Channel Memory for your RAM, as well as SATA RAID support for your SATA hard drives. ROG Connect gives you a way to plug a laptop computer into the motherboard and tweak or flash the BIOS to your heart's content. This means no more worrying about a corrupted BIOS ruining your motherboard. With the onboard EAX 5.0 HD audio, you get all the features of Creative's SoundBlaster Audigy sound cards.
Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H
In contrast to the motherboards with Intel chipsets that are compatible with Intel processors, this motherboard from Gigabyte is built for AMD processors. One thing that sets Gigabyte boards such as this one apart from the rest is their "True 333" technology. Basically this means you get a motherboard that delivers three times the power to SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 ports. To put this in perspective, consider that USB 2.0 transfers data at 480 megabits per second, while USB 3.0 on this board transfers data at 5 gigabits per second.
MSI P55A Fuzion
The big idea behind the MSI's P55A is to get two different types of graphic card technologies to work together. Typically, a motherboard is optimized for Nvidia's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) graphics cards or ATI's Crossfire graphics cards. Due to the competition between Nvidia and ATI, their cards are designed not to work on the same system. The P55A solves this problem by using a technology from Lucid appropriately named Fuzion. Most popular games and applications are already supported by the Fuzion driver, and once you have installed drivers for your video cards, all you have to do is download and install the Fuzion driver from Windows 7 website (see Resources).
Tags: this board, from Windows, Fuzion driver, graphics cards, Intel processors, SATA hard