The Best Nvidia Motherboards

Nvidia has long been a chipset design company. By designing motherboards, Nvidia has been able to place its integrated graphics into more systems and also help promote SLI, which typically works only on Nvidia chipsets (although the new X58 chipset for Core i7 products are an exception). This said, Nvidia has recently stumbled in the motherboard market. Their offers are starting to look less interesting compared to the very good motherboard chipsets offered by AMD and Intel.

That doesn't mean Nvidia motherboards are worthless, however. The three motherboards listed below are all Nvidia chipsets and they are all extremely capable products which would be a good selection, particularly if either a solid integrated graphics or multi-GPU graphics solution is needed.

Perhaps no motherboard chipset is more under-appreciated then Nvidia's Geforce 9300 and 9400 products. These motherboards, all of which are Micro ATX format or smaller, cram in an amazing amount of content for a small package. The Geforce 9400 is an excellent building block as it provides graphics which are sufficient for most anything except for playing new graphics-intensive games. Older games and HD content will play beautifully. If you're looking for more power, however, the Nvidia Geforce 9400 chipset supports Hybrid SLI. Hybrid SLI allows the on-board graphics to team up with certain Nvidia graphics cards to boost performance and provide better power management.

Besides the integrated graphics, this particular motherboard is outstanding for the content it provides considering the size. The Gigabyte Geforce 9400 includes a full-fledged x16 PCI Express slot 2.0, support for modern LGA775 processors including the latest Core 2 Duos and Quads, and even support for Firewire. So long as one doesn't need to make use of the PCI slots beneath the PCI Express expansion in combination with a large video card, this motherboard would work well for nearly any build. The asking price of $129.99 isn't amazing, but it is good considering that small motherboards with this many features are rare and command a price premium.