What amount should I spend on a MOBO?

[MARSTG]

if you don't plan on getting a SSD, you can also get something older as chipset. what I would focus most would be the video card and the power supply. A single powerful videocard and the power supply to go with it. A core i3 on 1156 would be a good idea too, is a pretty good gaming chip.

[frontier204]

For motherboards, find out which features you'll actually use in the lifetime of your PC and get a board that has all those features but not much more than that. Motherboards aren't as bad as say... power supplies if you cheap out (cheap power supplies are hazardous). Newegg's search has a good number of filters to get boards with specific features.
If you are going to use a higher end CPU (e.g. Phenom 955/965/975 or six cores), look for a board with MOSFET heat sinks and an 8-pin power connector and that should last you longer.

I see you put two ASUS boards in your comparison so it looks like you already know to look for brands which have half-decent support. I've only used ASUS, Gigabyte, and Intel for boards myself.

[Silvgearx]

990FX Ideal for someone wanting to run 3x GPU -$200 range

990X Ideal for dual GPU or someone that wants extra PCIE2.0 for extra PCIE devices. ( sound card, storage drivers) -$120-$140 Range

970 Good for people that don't need SLI/CFX -$50-$80

Most of the boards will be able to achieve decent overclocks for CPUs for the everyday advance user. Your pretty much paying for the PCIE lanes.


880G The G series chipset have IGP, extremely popular for HTPC and small basic office/surf/video machine.


If overclock is not your thing then just go buy a cheap decent board like 870/970 and save the money for decently clocked cpu and a gpu.