Best gaming motherboard in 2024

As we found in our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review, this premium motherboard is the perfect partner for the current best gaming CPU. For a start, it looks beautiful, with a swirling RGB dragon on the I/O panel shield, and you even get lighting on one of the M.2 SSD heatsinks.

It’s packed to the gills with features too, including two USB-C 4.0 ports, a pair of USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a massive count of nine USB-A ports. MSI has really gone to town with the toolless access as well. 

We particularly liked the push-button control to unlock your graphics card from its PCIe slot, which saves fiddling around with the normal latch. Likewise, you can also fit an SSD and heatsink without having to reach for a screwdriver.

We also used this board to overclock the 9800X3D, and liked the easy options in the EFI for enabling AMD overclocking. You can easily get your CPU boosting to 5.4GHz in games with this board, just by changing a few settings.

Thanks to its use of AMD’s latest X870E chipset, there are also no worries about PCe 5.0 SSDs stealing lanes from your graphics card, and you even get a pair of PCIe 5.0 SSD M.2 ports, complete with heatsinks. This board isn’t cheap, but it’s a great foundation for a high-end AMD PC.

Read our full MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi review.

If you want the best motherboard to screw into a frosty white PC case, then look no further, as Gigabyte’s attention to detail on this board’s white finish is superb. It’s not just the PCB that’s white, but also the rear I/O panel, sockets, and heatsinks. Even the POST code display is white. To use the words of Spinal Tap, it’s none more white.

The Gigabyte Aorus Elite X870 WiFi7 Ice isn’t just a pretty PCB either. Based on AMD’s latest X870 chipset, it offers an ideal home to one of AMD’s latest Zen 5 CPUs, such as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and it also offers a surprisingly packed feature set for its price. This includes ten USB-A ports, plus a pair of USB-C 4.0 ports, on the rear.

You even get three PCIe 5.0 M.2 ports for installing one of the best gaming SSD options, although some of them will take lanes from your graphics card, so check the manual before you install your SSD. Toolless features are good as well, requiring no need for a screwdriver to install an M.2 SSD, while Gigabyte’s EZ-Latch Plus button enables you to release your graphics card without having to scrape your hands fiddling with the usual locking latch on your PCIe slot.

To top it all off, this attractive motherboard isn’t even that expensive. You can get the same raw CPU performance from a cheaper board based on the B650 chipset, of course, but this motherboard’s price of $289 offers decent value for its feature set and good looks.

Read our full Gigabyte Aorus Elite X870 WiFi7 Ice review.

While the new Intel Arrow Lake lineup didn’t set the world alight when it comes to gaming performance, there are plenty of other reasons to consider building a PC based on one of Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 CPUs. If your priority is getting the fastest multi-threaded performance possible, perhaps for video encoding or 3D rendering work, then Intel’s latest CPUs are ideal, and they don’t draw much power either.

If you’re planning to build an IntelArrow Lake system, you will need a motherboard that uses the new Intel LGA1851 socket, as the LGA1700 motherboards for Intel’s last three CPU generations won’t work with the new chips. Our top choice here is the Asus TUF Gaming Z890-Plus WiFi, which we used for testing in our Core Ultra 265K review.

Despite its wallet-friendly price, this motherboard has a solid range of features, including easy tool-free access to the M.2 slots, while the chunky PCIe 5.0 SSD heatsink has an easy-release button to so make it easy to install your fast SSD. Similarly, the hinged latch release system on the far right of the board makes it really easy to free your graphics card from its PCIe slot.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of expansion slots, and several USB ports on the rear panel, including six USB-A ports, and two USB-C ports, one of which supports Thunderbolt 4. There’s not much in the way of RGB lighting, with just a little bit of underglow in the top right corner, but we also quite like this board’s smart, black appearance. What’s more, this motherboard doesn’t demand a silly price, costing just under $300.

However, we recommend updating this motherboard’s BIOS to the latest version, to avoid compatibility issues with Windows. Read our guide on how to flash your BIOS to see how this is done.

Asus absolutely nailed it with this superb Intel LGA1700 motherboard, which we’ve been using for all our Intel 14th-gen CPU reviews, and which our hardware editor also uses as the motherboard in his own PC (pictured above to show off the lights in the dark). This premium motherboard isn’t just packed with features, but it also looks fantastic.

The big eye-catching feature, of course, is that bright, glowing ROG panel on top of the I/O shield, but there are plenty of other exciting gadgets with this board that make it a great home for a Core i9 14900K. For a start, the 16x PCIe 5.0 slot means it can happily run a next-gen GPU, possibly including the Nvidia RTX 5000 series, at full speed.

Meanwhile, the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot ensures you can add a high-speed SSD, while a further four (yes, four) PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots mean you’ll have plenty of room for all the drives you could want. You also get support for the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard, and the audio quality from the ESS9218 DAC is superb.

Other handy features include the tool-free M.2 ports, which mean you don’t have to fiddle with a tiny screw to install your drives. The same also goes for the Q-Release system for the top graphics slot, where you push a button to release your graphics card from its slot, saving the hassle of having to fiddle around under a massive GPU cooler.

There are loads of USB ports as well, including a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, and the front-panel USB-C connector can supply up to 60W for quickly charging your devices. Mainly, though, it just looks fantastic. You can get the same CPU performance from a cheaper motherboard, of course, and the ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero is very far from cheap, but this motherboard is a great basis for a high-end Intel 14th-gen gaming rig.

Building the best mini gaming PC doesn’t have to mean compromising on performance, and this is perfectly demonstrated by this top-tier mini-ITX motherboard from MSI. Based on Intel’s Z790 chipset, it makes a great home for an Intel 14th-gen CPU, and it even has a 16x PCIe 5.0 slot ready for the next generation of graphics cards, such as the Nvidia RTX 5000 series.

Amazingly, it even has room for you to install three M.2 SSDs, including a pair of PCIe 4.0 models, and there’s a hefty SSD heatsink on the front of the board as well. One of the features that really impressed us about this board was its EFI system, which is well laid out and easy to navigate, with some excellent fan control settings.

We even managed to overclock the Core i5 13600K on this motherboard to 5.7GHz on all cores, thanks to its solid VRM cooling. This board isn’t cheap, especially for an option with no RGB lighting, and it could do with more USB ports, but it’s otherwise a great option if you want to build a high-end mini gaming PC.

Read our full MSI MPG Z790I Edge WiFi review.

This LGA1700 mATX motherboard from MSI is a solid choice for a budget or mid-range gaming PC build and is our personal pick for the best B660 motherboard. It comes with two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs and a plethora of USB 3.0 ports despite its smaller footprint. You can fit up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM across 4 DIMM slots at a maximum frequency of 4,800MHz to boot.

You’ll miss out on any overclocking potential of the K-series Intel processors but with the mighty Intel Core i5-12400 and its non-K ilk still offering serious gaming performance at stock speeds, meaning that’s not too big an issue. The MSI Pro B660M-A is also a nicely proportioned board too, allowing you to drop it into a more svelte chassis than the larger ATX board standard.

For the price, we’d have appreciated a broader selection of rear I/O ports, but to be honest, the overall selection should still be fine for most people. Just keep it in mind and think about how it would be positioned within your setup.