Motherboards are like roadies. They do all the heavy lifting, but no one gives them the credit they deserve. Most builders treat them as an afterthought, or worse, a way to quietly inflate the price tag. We’ve seen £1200 builds with £350 motherboards shoved in “for better performance.” Spoiler: it doesn’t work that way.

At Punk PC, we pick boards for balance and reliability, not marketing nonsense or pointless metal armour.

The Problem With “Premium” Boards

A motherboard doesn’t make your games faster. Let’s start there.
It’s there to make everything work properly. Once you’ve got solid VRMs, decent cooling, and enough ports for your setup, that’s 95% of the job done. Everything else is branding and RGB strip tax.

Expensive boards do have their place if you’re overclocking, using high-end CPUs, or need tons of connectivity. But slapping one into a mid-range gaming rig is like buying designer tyres for a push bike. Looks fancy, achieves nothing.

How We Choose Ours

We build from the inside out. First, we look at the CPU and what it actually needs. Then we pick a board with strong power delivery, proper cooling, and the right chipset features.
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, multiple M.2 slots, and enough USB ports, sure, all important. But we won’t upsell you on a board with 14 SATA ports just to sound impressive.

Every board we use has to pass our stability tests. That means no sketchy BIOS behaviour, no weird compatibility quirks, and no “works fine once you update it 12 times” nonsense.

Avoid the Flashy Filler

You’ve seen them. Motherboards with metal “gamer armour,” RGB lighting bright enough to guide planes, and features no one’s asked for since 2012. All flash, zero reason.
If a motherboard costs more because it comes with “reinforced PCIe brackets,” that’s marketing fluff.

We’d rather put that extra £100 towards a faster GPU or more storage where you’ll actually feel it.

Intel, AMD, and Common Sense

We don’t play favourites. AMD and Intel both have brilliant platforms, and each generation changes the game. What matters to us is stability, long-term support, and BIOS reliability. We keep up with the chipset roadmaps, BIOS updates, and firmware quirks so you don’t have to.

When we say a board’s solid, we mean it’s been tested, tortured, and proven to work without hiccups.

The Punk PC Way

No overpriced flex pieces. No underbuilt budget boards pretending to be “gamer-grade.” Just properly matched motherboards that fit the build, the budget, and the job.

Because a good motherboard shouldn’t be a mystery or a marketing ploy. It should just work.

We build rigs that last, and the foundation starts right here.
That’s why we use the motherboards we do.
Smart picks, solid builds, zero nonsense.