Buying a motherboard? Check this amazing site first | usagoldmines.com

Shopping for a motherboard can get surprisingly complicated. A board might advertise five M.2 slots and a stack of PCIe slots, which sounds great… until you find out that using one of them can slow down or disable another.

Enter MoboMaps. This free site lays out a motherboard’s PCIe connections in a simple interactive map, showing how lanes run from the CPU and chipset to the GPU, M.2 slots, and other expansion slots. The visual layout is a much easier way to spot potential conflicts than digging through a 100-page motherboard manual looking for one tiny footnote. One of my coworkers here at PCWorld introduced me to this site and I plan to use it before I install any new boards on a build.

MoboMaps is especially useful if you’re planning to install a lot of hardware. On some boards, for example, putting an NVMe SSD in a certain M.2 slot can knock your graphics card connection from x16 down to x8. MoboMaps has a handy performance checker that lets you toggle different components and see which ones might end up sharing bandwidth.

It’s also useful before you buy anything. You can filter boards by brand, chipset, form factor, PCIe generation, number of M.2 slots, USB4 support, and whether they share lanes with the GPU. There’s even a side-by-side comparison tool. MoboMaps currently covers more than 200 motherboards including the most popular brands.

If you’re putting together a gaming PC or adding another SSD, MoboMaps is a great tool to check before making a purchase or starting a new build.

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