The Best HTPC Motherboards for Your Home Theater or Gaming Setup

There’s nothing wrong with this motherboard, but it’s just not quite as ideal as the Gigabyte GA-Z97M-D3H. This model has four slots for memory with support for up to 32GB of 1600 DDR3 RAM. That’s just as much maximum memory as the Intel board from Gigabyte, but the maximum speed is much lower on this model, so you’re far more limited in how fast your RAM can be with this motherboard. This model has a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, which is perfect for a fast video card. You get six SATA connections on this motherboard, which is pretty good, but nothing spectacular. The H97 chipset on this board doesn’t support overclocking while the Z97 on the Intel board from Gigabyte does, but this should still work well for many HTPC builds.

Although this is still a very good option for an HTPC motherboard, it’s just not as strong as the GA-F2A88XM-D3H from Gigabyte. This model has four memory slots and supports up to 32GB of 1600 DDR3 RAM. That’s half as much memory as the other AMD board from Gigabyte, and the maximum speed of the RAM is significantly slower with this board. You get a single PCIe 2.0 x16 slot on this board, which is perfect for a fast video card that uses the PCIe 2.0 interface, but if you want to use a PCIe 3.0 graphics card, then this motherboard won’t work for you. This board has six SATA connections, but they are 3.0Gb/s connections, rather than the 6.0Gb/s connections on other boards. You do get an IDE connector on this board, which is perfect for older hard drives that use PATA connections, so keep that in mind if you plan on using an older hard drive in your HTPC.

While this is still a great option for a HTPC build, it’s just not as strong as some of the other models you could pick to work with an Intel CPU. This board has only two slots for memory, while many other options have four, and supports only up to 16GB of 1600 DDR3 RAM. That should be plenty of memory for a HTPC, but only having two slots limits the way in which you can set up your RAM, and makes this choice a poor option for building a powerful HTPC to also work as a gaming rig. You get one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot on this board, which works well for a solid middle-of-the-road video card, but won’t work if you want to use a PCIe 3.0 graphics card. There are only four total SATA ports on this board, two SATA3 and two SATA2 connections which is less than most other comparable boards. That limits how many hard drives you can set up with this board, so keep that in mind if you want a ton of storage.

If you prefer Intel to AMD, then this is probably the best option for you when choosing an HTPC motherboard. It has four memory slots and can support up to 32GB of 3100 DDR3 RAM, which is more than enough for a home theater rig. This model has a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, perfect for a high-performance graphics card. While that’s not ideal for building an HTPC that is also meant for playing demanding PC games, it’s perfect for streaming media or playing video and audio from a hard drive. There are six SATA connectors on this board, so you can build it with a ton of storage for your media content. The CPUs that work with this motherboard have pretty low power requirements, so you can keep your system running well without creating a lot of extra noise to keep your rig cool.