Bear in mind these important gaming motherboard features

[ManiaC]

I also think that pc enthusiast and gamer fall in the same category and the outsider as such would be the over-clockers. They look for boards with multi-phase power, solid capacitors, no cold boot issues, dual bios and on board reset / power switches to name a few.

As a gamer / software developer all I really want is stability and solid performance, and that is obtainable even with a basic board with a good CPU.

[Weasley]

I don't understand, PCIe has been around for a long time and it will still be around for a number of years so what exactly could your motherboard do to limit your future options?

I'm not saying you should get a crap mobo, I'm just saying you could make it work and if you had to choose between getting a slightly worse mobo (up to a limit) for a slightly better gfx card.

For me there are only 2 real performance upgrade paths for a PC, RAM and Gfx. As long as your mobo has a 16x PCIe slot (don't they all?) then you are good for the foreseeable future since there has been nothing to suggest this will change. That leaves RAM as you major concern and those issue were correctly highlight in the article.

I don't consider your CPU as upgradeable as I've mentioned before, in fact the last time I can even remember upgrading my CPU was when I went from a P3 333MHz to a 500MHz model (iirc). I just always find by the time your CPU needs upgrading the technology has changed and you need a new mobo/cpu/ram anyway.

ya but if you are limited to PCIe v1 and your new card need v3 to work to the max then you have problems