Buying a motherboard? Check this amazing site first

Useful takeaways from this story.

A board might advertise five M.2 slots and a stack of PCIe slots, which sounds great… until you find out that using one of them can slow down or disable another.

The visual layout is a much easier way to spot potential conflicts than digging through a 100-page motherboard manual looking for one tiny footnote.

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The useful part

A board might advertise five M.2 slots and a stack of PCIe slots, which sounds great… until you find out that using one of them can slow down or disable another. The visual layout is a much easier way to spot potential conflicts than digging through a 100-page motherboard manual looking for one tiny footnote. One of my coworkers here at PCWorld introduced me to this site and I plan to use it before I install any new boards on a build.

How it works

You can filter boards by brand, chipset, form factor, PCIe generation, number of M.2 slots, USB4 support, and whether they share lanes with the GPU.
MoboMaps is especially useful if you're planning to install a lot of hardware.
MoboMaps has a handy performance checker that lets you toggle different components and see which ones might end up sharing bandwidth.
MoboMaps currently covers more than 200 motherboards including the most popular brands.
If you're putting together a gaming PC or adding another SSD, MoboMaps is a great tool to check before making a purchase or starting a new build.</p...

Details worth keeping

Shopping for a motherboard can get surprisingly complicated.

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