Choosing a motherboard is actually something of a backwards process, because the motherboard will determine which CPU and RAM you can use. In most cases, I advocate picking a CPU first and then looking at your available motherboard options. It makes sense especially at the high-end, where the CPU will be the most expensive component in your PC. The only circumstance where I would choose a motherboard before a CPU is if you have expensive legacy adapters, older PCI or even ISA adapter that you are married to for industrial use reasons, and you require a motherboard featuring the proper number of legacy slots.
The 4th edition of Build Your Own PC features three different motherboard and CPU combinations, representing the latest in mainstream PC technology. The first build is a Pentium 4 LGA (Land Grid Array), the new Intel CPU package design for Socket 775. The motherboard used was an Intel D925XCV, which Intel kindly provided with the CPU, which was pre-production at the time I did the photography for the book. I'd actually put off doing the 4th edition for almost a year while waiting for Intel and AMD to release the platforms that would have a little shelf life, and the Socket 775 design with DDR2 support should remain the desktop computer flagship for Intel for a while. The motherboard also features the new PCI Express standard for the highest speed video card support, double the throughput of AGP X8.
owever, it's been AMD that's been pushing the performance barrier for desktop computers the past couple years, and we used an ASUS ABV Deluxe motherboard to support a Athlon 64 3800+ CPU. The ASUS motherboard supported 8X AGP, two banks of DDR, built in Gigabit networking, and didn't buckle under the weight of that huge chunk of copper called a heatsink:-) Both of these motherboard were standard ATX boards and could have just as easily been built in the other's corresponding case.
The Pentium 4 in Socket 478 with RAMBUS RDRAM (RIMM) was held over from the third edition, in part to illustrate the RDRAM, and in part because of the SCSI drive option. The motherboard was a D850MD, which is really a small format ATX, but was available pre-production back when I was doing the third edition. All of these motherboards featured full I/O cores with sound, I/O ports and USB, with the newer motherboards going over the top with 6.1 and 7.1 sound!
The second chapter of the book discusses choosing a motherbard and getting the most bang for your buck with components, which roughly translates into, "buy a middle of the road CPU in the latest technology (in case you need to upgrade) with a middle of the road motherboard." It's really a question of buying what you need with the option to expand, since after you build your own PC you'll be ready and willing to upgrade it when the price of the $800 CPU falls to $100.
