The motherboard is one of the most integral pieces of the PC building puzzle because your choice of board answers a ton of questions for you before you even get started with anything else. It determines which processor generation and from which manufacturer you’re going to be picking from, it determines what kind of storage you can choose, and it will have a huge impact on what your PC looks like.
And I don’t even just mean in terms of form factor—though teeny mini-ITX mainboards all the way through to monstrous extended ATX mobos impact what size case you can build into—because your board can come as festooned with LEDs as any mechanical keyboard of the past decade. And have a ton of aRGB connections on them, too.
Though relative performance between different boards on the same chipset has almost entirely plateaued, there is still a huge amount of difference between motherboards in terms of feature set, memory support, and especially power componentry.
We’ve reviewed many different boards in the latest AMD and Intel chipsets this year, and a lot of them have been very good (if damned expensive), but only three have a chance to win its own PC Gamer Hardware Award. And the nominations are…
The best motherboard of 2023: the nominees
The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best motherboard will be announced on New Year’s Eve. All three of these motherboards are in with a shot of taking home the big prize, so tune in to find out which one it’ll be.