I hate overspending on motherboards as much as the other guy, but some features are just too useful to pass up. These days, $150 motherboards come with the bare minimum, lacking adequate VRMs and I/O. Once you jump to the sub-$200 segment (mostly $179–$189 boards), things change for the better as you also get BIOS flashback and 2.5G LAN, but you're still not quite there.

These sub-$200 motherboards might be good enough in terms of performance, connectivity, and I/O, but many of them lack features that are considered essential in 2025. I'm talking about the number of M.2 slots, USB 20 Gbps ports, enough fan and ARGB headers, and white variants. When you're spending close to $200 on a motherboard, expecting these features isn't unreasonable. However, as it stands, you often need to go over the $200 mark to get access to them.

5 All-white designs

Looks are important, after all

Surprisingly, it's hard to grab one of the best white motherboards for under $200. Almost all the boards you'll see have a standard black PCB with minimal white or silver accents. These boards might look okay, but they're far from the all-white esthetic many PC builders prefer. It's all the more frustrating when you can get white PC cases, white CPU coolers, and white RAM for under $100 each, but the best-looking white motherboards cost more than $200.

Motherboards are supposed to cost more than each of those components, yes, but the premium PC builders need to pay just for a white variant is not justified. The Gigabyte Aorus Elite AX ICE series motherboards sport one of the best designs on the market, but you need to pay around $210 for a B650 or Z790 ICE motherboard. When most builders try to minimize their motherboard budget, the lack of good-looking options under $200 is tragic.

4 Enough fan and ARGB headers

You don't know when you'll need them

Every motherboard has the mandatory CPU_FAN, CPU_OPT, and AIO_PUMP headers. What I'm referring to are the system (chassis) fan and ARGB headers that are always in short supply on $160–$200 motherboards. You might get as many as 4 system fan and 3 ARGB headers on some sub-$200 motherboards like the Asus TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi, but this isn't the norm at all. Boards like the ASRock B650 Steel Legend provide only 3 chassis fan headers.

When you build your PC the first time, you might not feel this configuration is lacking, but once you start adding some more ARGB cable extensions, bottom intake fans, and a rear exhaust fan, you'll find you've run out of headers. Motherboard headers seem like a weird area to cut costs, but that's how it is. If a few more dollars get you enough headers to save the hassle of arranging a fan hub at the last moment, then so be it.

3 M.2 heatsinks for all slots

Why the skimping?

I get that the lack of pre-installed heatsinks isn't a dealbreaker, especially for Gen4 SSDs, but when manufacturers provide a heatsink for the primary M.2 slot, why not do the same for the rest of them? M.2 heatsinks look way better than leaving your NVMe SSDs naked, especially when most SSDs aren't designed with looks in mind. Some sub-$200 motherboards go the extra mile and provide heatsinks for each M.2 slot, but many ASRock and Asus boards still don't.

Even if you have no plans of installing a Gen5 M.2 SSD that will probably need the extra cooling, pre-installed heatsinks have become the sort of thing you expect on all but the cheapest motherboards. Currently, you might need to spend north of $200 to get that privilege, but I believe in another year or so, there will be very few motherboards left without this feature.

2 Sufficient M.2 slots and Gen5 support

Two SSD slots just don't cut it anymore

The motherboard currently on my PC is a B550 Aorus Elite AX V2, a $175 board that has two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots (with heatsinks, by the way). While I was happy with that configuration in 2022, I wouldn't buy a motherboard with anything less than three M.2 slots today. And, needless to say, one of them will need to be a PCIe 5.0 slot. You might be surprised, but there are motherboards on the market that still fall short of this standard.

Take the Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX, for instance, whose earlier iteration has three M.2 slots, but each of them supports only PCIe 4.0. Then, there is the ASRock B650 Pro RS which has three slots, but one of them supports the older Gen3 standard. And the less said about the $150 Asus Prime B650-Plus Wifi, the better, as it has only two M.2 slots (one PCIe 5.0 and one PCIe 4.0).

When you cross the $200 mark, you easily get three M.2 slots, with one of them being Gen5 and the other two Gen4. You might not be using the Gen5 slot today, but you'll need it in a few years when Gen5 SSDs drop further in price, and newer games start making use of them via DirectStorage.

1 USB-C and 20Gbps ports

Another minimum in 2025

Even mid-range motherboards are found skimping on decent I/O, so expecting big things from cheaper motherboards is unrealistic. While $150 and cheaper motherboards reasonably cut costs everywhere they can, the sub-$200 segment is less justified when doing the same. In 2025, buying a $200 motherboard with no USB 20 Gbps or USB-C ports is not recommended.

I'll not get into the convoluted USB standards involving USB 3.1, USB 3.2, and their various reincarnations. In a nutshell, USB 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps are common on every motherboard, but having a decent number of them along with at least a single 20 Gbps port (USB-C or otherwise) is still rare. While some sub-$200 boards will have a 10 Gbps USB-C port, there'll be no 20 Gbps ports in sight. With USB 40 Gbps ports already out for a while on higher-end motherboards, we should at least get a single 20 Gbps port on $200 motherboards.

It's time to call $200+ motherboards the new budget boards

It wasn't so long ago that budget motherboards used to get almost all the necessary features, albeit in lesser quantities. Times have changed, however, and to get the same experience, you need to spend $200 or more on a motherboard today. The ones that cost a bit less skimp on one area or another, and the ones that cost significantly more don't quite justify their price. You need to tread a fine line between these two segments, spending just a little over $200 to grab a motherboard that has all of the above features that make your life easier.