 Welcome to the first installment of the $100-ish Z97 motherboard showdown. Now we normally focus on really expensive top-tier motherboards, which are essentially made out of unobtanium, and as we've actually demonstrated before on this very channel, they don't really have a huge impact in performance in a negative or positive way. It's the $100-ish motherboards that the majority of people are actually going to buy, and that's why we decided to make this series, to help people understand the pros, cons, and trade-offs that they're going to be making when shopping for a value motherboard, and in this episode we'll be focusing on the physical features of the boards themselves, the beginning and the end of what many people are shopping for on motherboards. But as you'll see in the rest of the videos in this series, there's a lot more to it than that, so stay tuned. Ensure swift victory with Corsair's highly responsive lightweight gaming mouse, the Sabre RGB. Click now to learn more. One of the big sales pitches for motherboards is the F-Phraser, future-proof, and that's how a lot of people end up paying $300-plus for a motherboard, so they have room to upgrade, and I guess there's something to be said for having a bazillion SATA ports, USB ports and headers, and PCI Express slots. But if you give your future plans some real thought, you might realize that you're more likely than not to add a standalone NAS than 18 freaking internal hard drives, and if you really need that storage space, I mean, where are you going to find a case for all that anyways? And you're unlikely to need 10 USB 3.0 ports as well, because by the time you do, it might be time for a new motherboard with USB 3.1 anyways. So the only real problem future-proof-wise for a value board is that you need to look a bit more closely before you pull the trigger. Something that could save you so much money that you could literally buy two motherboards, one now and one later when you want to upgrade, for the same price. Some stuff is less obvious than hard drives or USB ports though, and while people that end up buying high-end motherboards will often have room in the budget for a fancy fan controller, the value builder will want to make sure that their motherboard can actually support all the fans that they want to put in their case. Otherwise, they'll be stuck running fans at full speed connected to the power supply, or leaving fan slots on their case empty to save some money. Speaking of fans and cooling, our physical overview included a look at the cooling capabilities of the motherboard. This was interesting because while we expected the dramatically different looking heatsink and VRM designs to yield significant differences in VRM and motherboard temperatures, especially based on the fancy heat camera imagery we've seen in motherboard A versus competitor screenshots over the years, and what we really got was a couple degrees here or there, which is pretty much within the margin of error of our infrared thermometer. The good news is that while all these value boards had slightly different temperatures, they all stayed within the operating temperatures of the boards, but please note our CPU is not overclocked, so your mileage may vary if you decide to crank things up a bit. Now with super high-end boards, you can assume that they'll support at least two-way crossfire and two-way SLI, but with value boards you might discover that the board has multiple PCI express slots, but lacks the certification or appropriate bandwidth allocation for some multi-GPU configurations. So while these boards all supported AMD Crossfire, they did not all support SLI. Of course, a ton of you will not be running SLI on hundred-ish dollar motherboards, but it is a nice feature if you are an Nvidia user and plan to be picking up a cheap used graphics card sometime in the future to breathe life back into your build. Maybe something to keep in mind for the long run. Some general build quality observations we made were things like the heat sinks on the board, and if they were secured by screws or push pins. I personally prefer screws as they're less likely to become dislodged in shipping or deteriorate as the board heats and cools over its lifespan. We also checked how the locking mechanism worked for the PCIe 16x slots. Lance and I both prefer when the wing-based design has an included notch for the screwdriver so that if we need to push it down in that way we won't risk a slip which could result in us stabbing the motherboard. The normal wing design is fine in the top slot because you can more easily get at it with a finger, and neither of us are a fan of the pull tab design which has resulted in scraped knuckles for both of us at some point in time or another in the past. And last but not least in our speeds and feeds rundown, here is the warranty. While this isn't a physical feature, it will ensure that you have physical features to talk about for a specified amount of time. Warranties are important at all levels of purchasing decisions but especially when you're purchasing a value computer because you probably don't have the spare cash to just be swapping out dead boards all the time. Although warranty can probably be ignored entirely if you plan on doing something silly like dunking all your computer components in mineral oil. One other point here is that checking with buddies, especially ones who live in the same part of the world as you, is a great idea and a good due diligence best practice kind of thing to do because the quality of warranty services for a given brand can vary dramatically from from one region to another. So in summary again, this video was essentially just a physical feature comparison with the main point being that at any given price point you won't actually find many huge differences that show up on a spec sheet and that by shopping by specifications alone you could lead to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter what you buy but that's not the case and in our future videos we'll cover things like how easy the board is to build with, how finely tuned the UEFI BIOS is to navigate, and the finished system experience of each motherboard. Now this might feel a bit counterintuitive but because motherboards all perform and overclock basically the same these days thanks to Intel moving most of the features that affect those characteristics onto the CPU itself. Throughout this series we will continue to focus on features, usability, build quality, and quality of life differences on these motherboards instead. So with that in mind let us know if you have any suggestions for things you'd like us to touch on and put those in the comments below or on the forum. If you love watching anime you should think about checking out Crunchyroll, not the delicious food, the streaming service. With Crunchyroll Premium you can watch as many episodes of your favorite anime shows as you want anywhere anytime. 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