I wish I had an answer for you. I tend to cheap out on motherboards, I bought the B760 Gigabyte Aorus Elite Ax DDR5 (I know I know, but I had just bought a 4090 and was feeling the pinch.)

And its really been not bad. There’s 3 m.2 slots which is not bad, 4 sata ports which is better than none I suppose. Memory overclocking works well. My 5600 cl36 kit is running at 6400 cl30 stable, which is a way bigger overclock than I was ever able to get stable on ddr4. I’m undervolting too, luckily my MB offered a feature to bypass the undervolt protection on b760 boards.

Doesn’t seem like there’s much performance penalty either. On cinebench 2024 my single thread score is actually slightly above expected ( 132 vs 131) and my multicore is also slightly above expected (2093 vs 2021) but it was a bit lower before the undervolt.

So really the only thing I can’t do is overclock the core. Oh well, 5.5ghz all pcore is good enough I say! This board I think was $225 cad or ~$160 US. So overall I’d say I’m satisfied. But next time I might go for a Z board, we’ll see.

Anyway sorry for the rant, I’m not saying buy a b760 board, just saying sometimes cheap boards aren’t as bad as they might appear, even if they are from a company that has some… image problems.

So I’d say, buy for the features you want. I mean if you want something that looks fancy looking there’s nothing wrong with that. But no point buying something just because its expensive. Oh, and if you want to get some of the fastest ddr5 around, it might best to get a board with 2 slots, instead of 4.