Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.
Every year, vendors fill the market with a veritable mass of new motherboards, all vying for your attention and wallet. There are so many that it would be almost impossible for anyone to review and test them all (unless they gave up eating and sleeping for 12 months), but we managed to get through nearly 20 of them.
Some of them were actually launched last year, but they're still relevant in 2025, because of the way that motherboards follow CPU release cycles. AMD and Intel released their latest generation of processors in 2024 (Ryzen 9000, Core Ultra 200S), and the first series of motherboards that came with them were all sporting the high-end chipsets (i.e. X870/870E and Z890). The mainstream chipsets (AMD's B850 and Intel's B860) didn't really appear in great numbers until the start of this year.
Common features that we all loved to see were: Wi-Fi 7, lots of fast M.2 slots for SSDs, user-friendly BIOS/UEFI interfaces, and quick-release mechanisms on the main PCIe slot for graphics cards and M.2 heatsinks. We also saw big improvements in the rear IO panels, with a proliferation of motherboards sporting lots of 10 Gbps or faster USB/Thunderbolt ports.
Compared to only a few years ago, motherboards have vastly improved in terms of build quality, although there have been a few too many cases of boards ruining CPUs for our liking. The good news is that you don't have to spend a small fortune to bag yourself a motherboard that will serve you well for many years, with excellent storage and expansion options.
We tested a lot of very good motherboards this year, as well as a lot of very average ones, but three really stood out for us. They're not the best because they're the cheapest or fastest, or because they have the most ports or sport the best VRMs. They're just the best motherboards of 2025 that we'd happily use in our own gaming rigs.
Best gaming motherboard 2025: the nominees
These three motherboards, our favourite ones out of all the boards we've tested and reviewed this year, are equal nominees for winning the award. As to which one gets the crown of 2025, we're announcing all the winners on New Year's Eve, so be sure to check back then.
