Motherboard: Gigabyte P35 GA-EP35-DS3L or Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5
There are many high quality motherboards on the market, but only a handful offer the key features we feel are most important:
1. Excellent overclocking support - specifically, for the Intel Core 2 CPUs that the Ion uses.
2. Support for full speed CrossfireX. CrossfireX is when you run two ATI Radeon graphics cards to drive one monitor for increased performance. Even if you only buy a PC with one video card, we want you to have the option of adding a second one later - it gives you an excellent upgrade option you otherwise wouldn't have!
3. Support for DDR2-800 memory. There is a considerably steep point of diminishing returns above this level of memory. You can spend three times as much money on DDR3 memory with zero increase in game performance (trust us, we've benchmarked it.) Even when faster memory does speed games up, the difference is so slight that it isn't worth the extra hundreds of dollars spent.
The Gigabyte P35 board is offered by default. It is a more affordable entry-level option with the same performance as the X48 board, but sacrifices Crossfire cabability to lower costs.
