AMD motherboard choices

[shiatan]

Building an AMD this time. Looking at several under $200, AM3+.
I am looking for a board that offers UEFI with some overclocking. I have never overclocked and like the idea of firmware that helps me and keeps me from offsetting something too much.
I'm thinking of a Phenom II X4 or X6 for now and an upgrade to FX in a year or so.
Looking at:
Asus M5A99X Evo
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA UD 3 or UD5 or UD7
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX
ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX - overkill for me?
I would appreciate help with working my way through the choices if you have patience.
motherboard, cpu, memory, ssd.
I have case, hd's, hoping to reuse my psu (600w)
Thanks, John

 

[tulx]

From what I've read (an that is a LOT - I'm planning my next PC as well) the Asus Sabertooth seems to be the best and most stable overclocker for its price. As to RAM, any compatible 2x4GB 1600 kit will do perfectly.
SSD - the Crucial M4 seems to be the reliable choice and the Corsair Force GT/Mushkin Chronos Deluxe are the top performers. The Vertex 3 is good as well, but a lot of people report it to be extremely unreliable. You never know on the internet, though.

You CPU choice is very good. If you plan to mostly play games, get one of the top P II's X4 - the 965 (stepping B3) or the 980. If you plan to do more heavily threaded tasks, get the X6 (1090 seems to be the best choice right now). I think FX will be inproved substantially later, so you should have a good CPU to upgrade to.

 

[lau808]

iirc gigabyte doesnt have uefi i'm not 100% on that tho. someone can correct me if im wrong. i believe asus got a lot of enthusiasm on thier uefi. the 990x should oc the same as the sabertooth. some site (cant remember) did reviews of the 900 chipset and compared the asus boards and all were very similar. oc being the same, the only reason for sabertooth over 990x would be warranty 5yr vs 3yr and more durable components, caps etc etc. gotta love the color scheme of the sabertooth tho

 

[allenthad70]

I'd say go with the ASUS Sabertooth...

from my personal experices, I've found the ASUS tends to be more stable and reliable than other motherboards out there.

 

[wirednuts]

any gigabyte/asrock/asus board is usually a good one, but if youre overclocking then definitely take a strong look at asus. they tend to add lots of features that help with overclocks... especially when you compare them to their budget brand, asrock. if im building a simple system for a customer, asrock boards are great. but if its for me, and i know im going to be adding/changing to it a lot, then asus all the way.

 

[sequoia464]

Tulx pretty much hit on the head.

I have a sabertooth right now - sort of wish I had the UD5 though. As for memory, I had some Kingston 1600 that didn't play nicely with my board, replaced it with some G.SKILL that works Much better - lower latencies, stable at 1600 , and 1.35 volts instead of 1.65 volts.
Kingston that sucked..http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...20111115182110
G.Skill..http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231404

I have several different types of SSD's - M4's Kingston's and Intel's - they all run fine on this board - I had some Vertex2's that were fine as well.

As far as the Vertex 3's (and all of the new Sandforce controllers actually, not just OCZ's) I think that most of the stability issues were with Intel chipsets, not AMD's. I'm sure someone can correct or confirm this. I stopped following the Sandforce saga when I decided on the M4's. Crucial also just brought out a new Marvell based SSD - If I wasn't set allready for SSD's I would be looking in to one of these...http://www.anandtech.com/show/5082/corsair-gives-marvell-another-try-with-performance-pro-ssd

EDIT: you might also want to look into a Zosma 960T as far as your CPU - it is a 4 core Thuban - two of the six cores are disabled, some can unlock to six - some can't, but even if they don't you still have a 4 core, unlocked, low voltage CPU. Check it out here .. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103995

 

[shiatan]

thanks for the help so far.
So far this is my thought,
Phenom II x4 980 black -$170
Asus Sabertooth 990FX /or/ Asus Crosshair V Formula
Which brings me to the next question, CrossFireX or not. Is it better for none cutting edge gaming to buy 2 - $100 cards or 1 - $200 card? Tom's Hardware just did a review and ranking of the cards and I'm not sure which way to go with the GPU's.

Also Memory.
Some people talk about 2-4GB sticks.
I was thinking 4-4GB sticks for 16GB. You can never have too much memory! lol
Can these boards support this? BIOS problems of reading all four DIMM slotes?
Or is this not an issue with 64-bit Windows?

 

[sequoia464]

It was probably bad settings on my part, but I had issues with 4 sticks of 4 gigs (Kingston HyperX - approved for the sabertooth).

Trimmed back to two of the G.SKILLS.

EDIT: As far as a CPU - you might want to investigate the Zosma that I linked above.

 

[lau808]

its usually better to get a $200 card than 2 $100 cards. with crossfire u have to worry bout scaling and microstutter etc etc, may not be a problem for u but single card eliminates this possibility.

 

[ctk1981]

I went with the gigabyte 990XA-UD3 on my recent build. Its a nice board, solid, everything is well labeled and color coded. Supports crossfire/SLI in 8x 8x which is good enough for me, I probably wont ever SLI anyways. Pretty solid reviews on the web and especially at newegg. Saved a little money vs going with a high end 990FX board, which was going to bring nothing to the table that I would actually need.

The bios is basically your standard affair that has been around for years, but has the borrowed support of 3TB drives from the EFI style bios....so its a hybrid EFI bios according to them. If you want a graphical overclocking tool you can always do it through windows and use AMD's Overdrive tool.

With regards to the card, buy the largest single card you can now. Maybe down the road when its a generation or two behind and they start selling them off cheaper, buy another and then crossfire or SLI.

 

[Taft12]

thanks for the help so far.
So far this is my thought,
Phenom II x4 980 black -$170
Asus Sabertooth 990FX /or/ Asus Crosshair V Formula
Which brings me to the next question, CrossFireX or not. Is it better for none cutting edge gaming to buy 2 - $100 cards or 1 - $200 card? Tom's Hardware just did a review and ranking of the cards and I'm not sure which way to go with the GPU's.

One $200 vid card is better.

I thought you said your motherboard budget was $200, but if you're thinking about the Crosshair V Formula now, it's the creme-de-la-creme. More overclocking options than me or almost anyone here can understand, but if you wanna learn about it, might as well go all out.

You said you'd upgrade to FX later, so I'd go for the cheapest Phenom X4 (955) and overclock and/or unlock it into something better as a fun OC learning project.