The motherboard is perhaps the least glamorous part of the personal computer. Video cards and CPUs all have their die-hard partisans and their benchmark bakeoffs, but a motherboard purchase is less often a matter of fanatical loyalty than it is one of rational cost/benefits/features calculations. Still, the motherboard is the part of the computer that all of the other components plug into, and as the foundation of an upgradable DIY system, it's a choice that demands a certain amount of patient research from the system builder. It's also a choice that has gotten much harder to make in the past two years. The motherboard is actually undergoing something of a Renaissance, as a number of technologies are bringing more bandwidth, more features, and more form factors in more combinations to that central component of any PC system.