Does A Motherboard Affect Gaming Performance?

There is absolutely no denying the fact that motherboards play a pivotal role in your PC, but a lot of times, people end up spending a lot of money on just a motherboard in the hope for a better performance and this is something that needs to be cleared out.

If you’re wondering how does a motherboard affect gaming performance, then you are at the right place since we aim to break it down.

Now, it is worth noting that the motherboard does improve performance, but it not might be as evident as you might think.

Still, we are going to take a look at everything you need to know so you can be in a better position when choosing a motherboard.

Do Motherboards Affect Gaming Performance?

Considering how gaming performance is paramount here, we are strictly going to focus on that, so you do not find yourself lost in the process of figuring out other things. Let’s not waste time and have a look.

#1- Stuttering Problems

Stuttering is one of the, if not the worst, problems that you can face when gaming. It can often break the immersion almost entirely and makes one want to pull their hair out.

There are a lot of causes behind stuttering, to be honest. Bad optimization on the developer’s part, dated GPU or GPU drivers, old CPU, bottlenecking, and incompatible hardware, but the motherboard is not one of those.

Sure, a faulty CPU socket can contribute to some extent to stuttering but not directly. If you are running a GTX 1050 and trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a $1,000 motherboard, it will perform the same as a $100 motherboard.

#2- Power Delivery to the CPU

Next, we have the power delivery to the CPU, another thing a lot of people are often concerned about.

Before you get all technical, it is important to know that if your CPU is not being delivered with appropriate power, it might refuse to work altogether and crash while performing some of the basic tasks.

So, chalking it up to the motherboard is not something I’d suggest. Sure, a faulty CPU socket can cause a lot of issues, but as I said before, you are not getting access to something that directly contributes to performance degradation.

Related guide: How to clean a motherboard

#3- Can a motherboard throttle a GPU?

Throttling, over the past couple of years, has become a common problem but has one of the easiest fixes.

For those who don’t know, throttling happens because the temperatures of a component are crossing the suggested limit, and in order to protect itself, the component throttles itself so the temperatures can be lowered and there is no damage.

A motherboard cannot really throttle the GPU. However, if, for some reason, the PCIe slot on the motherboard starts delivering more than 75W of power than it is supposed to, then there can be some issues, but it will most likely result in an instant shutdown or freeze.

You see, the PCIe slot on both the motherboard and the GPU you are using is only designed to give and take 75W of power, and anything more than that can cause a number of issues.

#4- Does the motherboard affect RAM speed?

All the motherboards that you do see in the market have the base speed of the DDR standard that is running in the market at that time.

So, for instance, the base DDR4 speed is 2,133 MHz. All DDR4 motherboards will run on this speed, but if you have a higher speed RAM and the motherboard supports that speed through XMP, then definitely, it will affect the RAM speed.

However, over the past couple of years, we have come to the conclusion that RAM speed does not affect gaming performance as much as RAM capacity does. So, a slower 16GB RAM will be much better than a faster 8GB of RAM in terms of gaming performance.

#5- The Overclocking

As far as overclocking is concerned, over the past couple of years, GPUs have generally become so much better in terms of delivering a performance that overclocking is not as effective in terms of gaming performance. Still, you can always squeeze a few extra frames as long as you can pull a stable overclock.

However, the one important thing to know about overclocking is that the motherboard does play a crucial role in overclocking the CPU and the RAM, but for GPU overclocking, that is entirely on your GPU and whether or not the silicone on the GPU is good enough for overclocking.

#6- Can motherboards affect FPS?

Nope, simply put, motherboards do not affect frames per second in any case. You can use a 13700K and an RTX 4080 and pair them with a really expensive or a cheap motherboard, and the performance difference will be negligible at best and might not even be there, to begin with.

Sure, expensive motherboards do offer better stability to those who are overclocking, better aesthetics, and more features, but in terms of pure performance, you are not getting a difference.

#7- SATA Ports

If you are wondering whether you are going to get extra performance in games from the SATA ports, then that is not going to be the case, either.

SATA is a standard that is slowly being phased out for a much better M.2 connector, and it gets even better when the drive supports NVMe as well.

The point is that storage can help load the games faster, but there is not going to be any impact on the overall performance of the games.

#8- Does a better motherboard increase Internet speed?

Modern motherboards have a better and faster ethernet port on them which can help with the internet speed.

However, for that, your installed internet needs to be good enough. You cannot just get a more expensive motherboard and expect your current internet speed to become faster, especially when it is maxed out already.

What motherboard specs affect performance the most?

A lot of people have been asking about the specs that affect the performance the most, and we are going to look at some things and clarify things for everyone. The reason here is simple; we want everyone to know what they are getting into.

Socket

For starters, the motherboard socket is not going to be affecting the gaming performance at all. Sure, the CPU that goes into that socket is going to affect the performance, but a socket is not going to do much.

Take a Z790 motherboard and a Z690 motherboard; both have the same sockets, but different motherboards, and you will notice that the performance is not affected.

Chipset

The chipset is the next thing that will not be having an impact on the performance in terms of gaming. Sure, buying a Z or X series chipset will allow your Intel or AMD CPU, respectively, but other than that, there is no difference.

I have seen a lot of people using K series CPUs on H series chipsets, and you still don’t really run into any issues as far as the performance is concerned.

Type of memory

We have discussed before how the memory speed is not something that will be affecting the gaming performance before.

Games, in general, want to have more capacity to use than the speed. So, there is no point in having a super-fast RAM when the game does not have enough capacity to use, in the first place.

GPU Slots

Again, GPU slots are not going to determine how many FPS you are getting in the games you are trying to play.

You could own a $1,000 motherboard and pair it with a $100 GPU, and you will see the performance will be absolutely horrendous. So, there is no point.

VRM Quality

VRM quality is something that will affect the performance but not where you think. Having better VRMs means that if you do decide to overclock, it will be more stable.

Even if you are running default settings, a better VRM means better overall stability, but that doesn’t have the impact on the gaming you are looking for.