Except in some narrow circumstances, you won't be buying a motherboard without also buying a new CPU and some RAM. You'll want to consider the price and performance of those two components along with your motherboard when you're making a buying decision. Often, the fastest CPU available is much more expensive than alternatives that are only slightly slower, and you'll get a much better value by purchasing a CPU that's a couple of notches below the fastest.

A motherboard component called the chip set determines many things about the board, including which CPUs and RAM types the board will support and, to some extent, what extras like integrated audio, video, and LAN ports are included.

As you can see below, there isn't a huge price difference between motherboards in the low-end and recommended ranges. And it's easy to find boards loaded with features around the $100 mark. Shop around, and you'll start to notice that motherboards with added features like LAN ports and IDE RAID controllers aren't much more expensive than boards without them. Even if you don't need those features now, you can save a lot of money paying $20 more for a motherboard that included them instead of $100 for an add-in board later.