>The main thing is to know there are two basic categories of motherboards, Intel and AMD. So you have to have your cpu picked out first. THen, you have to know the SOCKET type for that cpu. Then you look at motherboards that are either Intel or AMD type and that have the socket type you need to have on that motherboard. Once you have made these two decisions, you can look at all the motherboards from all the manufacturers you want that meet those TWO BASIC CONDITIONS. Some cpu's require a specific chipset and will not work with other chipsets, so, for example, the later Q processors 9XXX series, from Intel, required a P45 chipset on an LGA 775 motherboard. The LGA 775 is the socket type. First generation Intel i7/i5 's require a socket LGA 1156. Second generation intel i7/i5/i3 cpu's require either a P67 or now, a X68 chipset. There are some lower class H type chipsets but they are not that good, so I ignore them.
After you have the right type of motherboard and socket type with the right chipset, then you look at the board either being a microATX or a fullATX type motherboard. MicroATX usually has only two DIMM sockets for memory while full ATX has 4 or 6, depending on whether or not it is dual or trichannel memory.
After that, you just have to start comparing features. What kind of memory will the board take? How many PCIeX16 slots? Do you want to run SLI or Crossfire or just run a single video card? Do you want RAID capability? What kind of surround sound does the board have? How many additional regular PCI slots? How many USB ports and are they USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 or a combination?
What I do is I stick with only the TOP name brands and ignore all the other brands. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Asrock are the four brands I normally look at. There are a whole slew of secondary cheaper motherboards with questionable support, poor documentation, lousy English - I won't name them but you'll see if you visit the sites with those type of motherboards. They are the cheaper, lower end type motherboards anyway and I never go cheap on the motherboard. Believe it or not, the motherboard is THE most important component that you buy for a computer. Everything else is plugged into the motherboard and a bad mobo or lousy motherboard is your worst enemy when it comes to performance. It is NOT worth going cheap on a motherboard - I would rather cut down on other components like the video card, memory amount or size of hard disk. So choosing a good motherboard is crucial to good performance. The cheaper motherboards will buy you a "business class" type computer, that is good for absolutely rock bottom basic and routine computing needs but it will not get you into any kind of tweaking, overclocking, or provide performance level components.
What I would do if I were you is select 4 motherboards that you really like and can afford, compare each and every DETAIL, side by side, line item by line item and carefully compare every detail. After this, get it down to TWO motherboards. Then, go to the manufacturer site and download the motherboard manual for each of the two motherboards. Skim through and read both documents. Documentation is CRUCIAL. Cheap motherboards usually have CHEAP or lousy documentation (I hate ESI motherboards, for example, because they have really crappy documentation which makes their cheap motherboards worthless to me). You need to have a good motherboard manual that really explains everything to you - including pictures and diagrams and fully explains the BIOS as well. Crappy documentation and LOUSY ENGLISH are the two worst enemies you can encounter in buying a motherboard. You can figure that if a manufacturer cannot afford to HIRE A GOOD WRITER OF GOOD WRITTEN ENGLISH, then they aren't building good motherboards either.
That is my suggestion to you.