What to look for in new mobo

[mike1294]

So I plan on building my own computer pretty soon. I'm new to building so I have a couple of questions that concern the motherboard. I plan on using it for gaming such as civ 5 and the new sim city when it comes out. No first person shooters or anything like that. I'm trying to stay on a budget of about $500

1. I noticed that the newer boards come with PCI-E 3.0 but are also more expensive. Is it worth the extra money to buy a board with the 3.0 or will 2.0 suffice?

2. Also would you recommend springing for the 4 memory slots or would 2 be enough? I was thinking I could go with only 2 slots and put 8GB of memory in each slot.

Also was wanting to know if there is anything else you guys look for when buying a motherboard. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

 

[farrengottu]

pci-e 2.0 is fine. nothing takes advantage of 3.0 yet.
2 slots is fine. you can just get plenty of ram on two sticks. just sucks if a slot goes bad out of warranty.

usb 3.0 is a time saver for thumb drives that support it.
get solid capacitors. also called solid caps. they last MUCH longer. you dont want your board to die in a year. this greatly helps prevent that.