Motherboard articles

With the launch of the new GeForce 30 series, PCI Express 4.0 performance has come up into the discussion. To find out exactly what we're talking about, we've taken a deeper look.

Over the past week we've been testing AMD B550 motherboard VRMs and today we'll look at MSI Tomahawk motherboards from the past few generations comparing B350, B450 and B550 models, as well as some new and worthwhile B550 budget variants.

The latest generation of Intel Core CPUs have arrived accompanied by the new Z490 platform. Incredibly, there are over 50 Intel Z490 motherboards on the market, with prices ranging from $150 all the way up to $1,300. Here's what you should buy.

At long last AMD more budget-oriented B550 motherboards will finally go on sale. There's been plenty of talk about the B550 chipset and all the supporting boards for weeks, and we're now able to share our results with you. On hand for testing today we have the MSI B550M Mortar, MSI B550 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro and Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master.

MSI’s new Tomahawk is the most impressive X570 motherboard we’ve tested at the $200 price point and it deserves serious consideration if you're upgrading or building a new Ryzen machine. For this and other deserving mainstream X570 motherboard alternatives, read on.

After reviewing the Threadripper 3990X, it was made clear the 64-core/128-thread beast from AMD lays waste to every HEDT part we have ever tested. It's an insane productivity CPU, that we pushed to extremes to torture a few motherboards just this week. Then we thought, why not try out some big bulky coolers as well?

Today we're going to perform some AMD TRX40 motherboard VRM thermal testing using the powerful 64-core Threadripper 3990X. To apply load we're using Blender with the system running at stock and overclocked to 3.8 GHz. The typical power draw for this system is around 450 watts, but once overclocked we are hitting as much as 850 watts. Toasty!

Today we're taking a look at the performance impact having four DDR4 memory modules can have on performance in a dual-channel system, opposed to just two modules. In this scenario all modules are operating at the same frequency, use the same timings and provide the same total memory capacity.

How well do you know the components that make up your PC? Take the humble motherboard, it sits there, quietly keeping everything running, and rarely gets the same attention as the CPU or graphics card. Motherboards are remarkably important though, so let's go all Grey's Anatomy, and dissect the motherboard -- breaking down its various parts and seeing what each bit does!

As we anticipated when we reviewed AMD's new flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, rather than testing it on the very high-end Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, we want to see how it does on budget AMD B450 boards. Maybe this combo doesn't make sense right now, but it will in the future as a potential upgrade for many AM4 owners.

You're ready to go AMD on your next build, and we can't blame you. Third-gen Ryzen offers great options with core-rich CPUs at compelling price points. The new AMD X570 platform consists of high-end motherboards that enable PCIe 4.0 and M.2 Gen 4 storage along with other new features such as Wi-Fi 6, but expect to pay a premium for these.