I've been wondering this since I've joined these forums, but it seems like many people recommend a lot of Z77 boards from MSI, namely the G65 and MPower. From what I've seen however specifications-wise the boards are very similar to cheaper boards like the UD3H and Extreme4 from Gigabyte and ASRock, so I was curious what kind of differences there are.
A specific example/question I have comes from this thread, where it's recommended against running dual 670's off a D3H, though I can't seem to find anything that would make it any different from a higher-end board - it has dual 8x slots coming off the Z77 chipset, which is more than sufficient bandwidth wise. I've also seen the G45 being recommend very often over other boards, despite it's low quality phases and 4+1+1 design.
So my question is, what makes these boards any better over other units, and thus what makes a good motherboard? It seems like there's lots of details that I'm overlooking, but I'm not sure what exactly.
A specific example/question I have comes from this thread, where it's recommended against running dual 670's off a D3H, though I can't seem to find anything that would make it any different from a higher-end board - it has dual 8x slots coming off the Z77 chipset, which is more than sufficient bandwidth wise. I've also seen the G45 being recommend very often over other boards, despite it's low quality phases and 4+1+1 design.
So my question is, what makes these boards any better over other units, and thus what makes a good motherboard? It seems like there's lots of details that I'm overlooking, but I'm not sure what exactly.
