Now that you've got your new CPU picked out, it's time to pick out that brand new motherboard that's going to keep everything together for you! This is one of the most important components in your system, not mainly for performance, but for the reliability of your system. With a crappy motherboard, your system will give you subsequent crashes and BSOD screens, which you'll eventually get so annoyed of, you'll just throw out the board to get another one. My point? Get a good board the first time, and you won't have to worry about these things!

When it comes to the brand of the motherboard, there are basically two manufacturers that I look for: Asus and Abit. They usually have the most stable and reliable boards on the market, and the performance of their boards are excellent compared to others in the same class. If the board that you are looking for is not available by these two manufacturers, you have two choices. Either wait until they release a board that has the features you're looking for, or, if you just can't wait to get your new computer, look for a board made by the other manufacturers. When it comes to the other manufacturers, you should be a little more careful, as some of the boards are not very reliable (note the example I mentioned above). Either way, you should check in the motherboard section of our network of articles to find reviews on motherboards.

Regardless of the manufacturer of the board, all boards in a same class have the same chipset. A chipset is a set of computer chips built into the motherboard that control specific parts of the system. Usually, there's a chip built into the top half of the board called the Northbridge that controls the CPU, memory, AGP graphics and other parts of the system that deal directly with the CPU while the chip built into the bottom half of the board, called the Southbridge, controls other system components such as PCI and IDE devices. The main differences between different chipsets are usually in the Northbridge.

On to: Intel Chipsets