I see Richard you're not a techno geek. That's ok, not very many of us are and I'm sort of a semi techno geek, not a full blown one. I know enough to be dangerous mostly to myself, heh.

A few things I can think of concerning mobo's are HDMI video, an external SATA port and USB 3. You probably don't know what they are and they may or may not be important to you. HDMI is the standard hi def video interface. One cable carries the video and audio and can be daisy chained from one device to another so you don't need an HDMI hub like you do with USB. A HDMI PC usually has a better quality video chip too. SATA is the relatively new interface for connecting hard drives inside your PC. Much faster than the old IDE ribbons. What's cool about an external SATA port is you can boot from a SATA drive directly. That means when you make a clone of your system drive in case you have a unrecoverable HD crash, you take your external SATA drive that you put the clone on, plug it into that external SATA port and boot directly from it, no need to remove your old HD and physically install the cloned drive to recover the system. USB 3 is way faster than USB 2 but right now there's few USB 3 devices available so it's not that big of a deal yet. That's why I was willing to forgo that for now.

In looking at that site you posted I looked at the specs of a few of their mobo's they sell separately. Compare the cheaper $59 ones to the over $100 ones and you see what I just talked about. It's true they don't tell you what mobo that $499 PC has but I can guarantee you it's not one of the $100 ones. There's some true PC pros here who can go into it much more deeply than I can, maybe they'll see this thread and jump in.

Without going into much more geeky details that I don't know right off the top of my head anyway, you'll have to decide if these things matter to you but if you think they might then you'll just have to bite the bullet and do some reading and ask more questions here. You said keep it simple but with this stuff you really can't. It has to be explained using geeky terms and that's just the way it is. Almost everybody knows what HDMI is but if you don't it takes a small paragraph to explain it properly. Just like explaining MIDI or a DAW to the uninitiated. Either you know it already or it's off to school with you.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.