 Welcome to the second installment of the $100-ish Z97 motherboard showdown. As you know from the last video, we normally focus on badass top-tier motherboards, which are uncommon in the real world. And as we've demonstrated in the past, don't really impact performance in a positive or negative way. So this series will focus on the more sensible, affordable motherboards, which most people will actually be buying, and we're going to explore their pros, cons, and trade-offs. In this episode, we'll be covering the experience of building a computer with these motherboards. Things like PCI layout, fan header, and plug positioning when installing into a case, accessories, and even color selection will be covered. And videos for stuff like BIOS usability and finished system experience will be coming after CES, so stay tuned. The Cooler Master Neptune 240M features an exclusive pump design and their new Silencio fans to provide impressive near-silent performance. Click now to learn more. One thing on motherboards that gets a lot of attention is the PCI layout. Even people that I've built for in the past have been overly worried about the future-proof aspect of PCI layout, despite them having no real intention of adding more than one GPU, or any other card for that matter, to their system. So for most people, it is unlikely to make a difference, but it's still worth considering just in case. The top two slots and the bottom three slots on these boards are all identical, and those will be the most used slots anyways, because even when someone does decide to add more cards, they're unlikely to use the ones in the middle that did vary somewhat because of their proximity to the top PCIe 16x slot, which will render one useless with any dual graphics card setup, and the other not recommended to give aforementioned cards some breathing room. The fan headers, however, are of much greater importance if you want to take advantage of the fan speed control that's built into your motherboards. Many, if not all, of these headers can be used in a normal system, and their position can make or break the appearance of your cable management. Every board accommodated having a rear case fan, but after that they varied quite heavily. Gigabyte had a pretty balanced setup overall, although only having two headers near the top may limit your selection of AIO coolers slightly if the pump must be powered by a fan header. ASRock had the most included fan headers at six, but the positioning of them, while quite good for an air cooler, will no doubt be frustrating for anyone who wants to install a liquid cooling system in the top of their case, as none of the fan headers are at the top of the board, and only some of them were actually four-pin PWM headers. ASUS lacked quantity, with only four available fan headers, but at least the layout was fairly balanced, and MSI had, in my opinion, the best layout of all of them, with headers spread out all around the board, giving you the versatility to play around a little bit with the placement of your setup. Something to note is that the positioning in general here is the key point, not amount of headers. Don't forget you can mostly fix availability issues with inexpensive splitters. On to other connectors. Luckily for the PC building community, motherboard manufacturers seem to have come to a good old consensus when it comes to positioning of standard CPU and motherboard power, and standard case headers. We've passed the dark ages of randomly placed headers halfway up your freaking motherboard, and 24-pin or 8-pin power plugs randomly placed where they really, really shouldn't be for the sake of system airflow. I like right angle sockets for SATA, but not all cases allow the stiff USB 3.0 front panel cable to be installed this way, so I understand why most boards opt for a non-angled socket, but I must say I really like MSI's implementation with two sockets, one angled and one normal, because even though very few cases actually have four USB 3.0 ports, this gives you the flexibility to even either have tidier cable management or better compatibility. As for the rest of the headers, USB 2.0, front panel audio, and front switches, ASUS Gigabyte and ASRock all had varying degrees of good enough labeling, but MSI's front panel switches labeling was kind of off in the middle of nowhere, which was a little bit annoying to actually kind of find, and could be frustrating for some people. ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte all featured some degree of plastic guard around their headers, which can help you not screw up when tediously plugging in all your various headers, but the ASRock board did not feature any of these, but not a huge deal. The accessories included with these boards were essentially all the same standard fare you'd expect on a value board, exactly what you need with no flashy LED displays and OC brackets or any of that kind of stuff. Each included a user guide of some sort, an I.O. shield, two SATA cables, one driver disc, and every board except for MSI included a case badge, with Gigabyte and ASRock also giving you an SLI bridge as they support that feature. In terms of colors, every board had an unfortunate shade of brown for their PCB, except for ASRock, and ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI all went with fairly standard blue or red color scheme, with ASUS deciding to be a hero and go with gold. I get it, they're trying to communicate their whole we are the gold standard motherboards... thing, but personally I would prefer a propaganda sticker on the box instead of tacky gold on my motherboard, although if you want to go for that Iron Man look, matching it with some red components may work out for you. All one of you who's ever going to do that, Mr. Downey Jr. In summary, this video is about the importance of paying attention to how all your components will work together, instead of just how many raw features each one of them has individually. Thanks to standardization, your case will probably determine how well your cable runs work more than your motherboard. Your cooler will probably determine what fan header layout is best for you, and your desired color scheme, also the colors of the rest of your components, in all likelihood will probably determine what color you want your motherboard cooling heat sinks to be. So the moral of the story is to plan for what you will actually use, and not to overspend based on what you think you might possibly use in four to five years, when you'll probably be replacing this board anyways. By the way, the next video coming in the series will be the BIOS usability rundown of all these boards, which will also be very important, so stay tuned for that. All right guys, in the comments down below, let me know what you think is important about motherboards, and in the finished system experience and BIOS usability videos, let me know what you guys want to see. Again, comments down below, or on the forum. While you're commenting down below, or before you leave to the forum, be sure to like or dislike this video, depending on how you like the fact that we're doing kind of lower end motherboards than we normally do. Share the video if you think it's good, and subscribe to the channel if you have not already, over on the forum. 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