Asrock 970 extreme 3 or Asus M5a97?
Which of these motherboards should I get? I can get the Asrock for less with Mail in rebates.
Cpu fx 6300
GPU asus r9 270 oc
I have an Asus M5a97 r2. Bloody good motherboard. I have my own FX 6300 Overclocked to 4.5Ghz on 1.322Vcore. I could probably squeeze a bit more but I'm just a bit lazy. I do recommend however squeezing your budget a little and getting an M5a99fx if you are overclocking and thinking about upgrading to the 8 Core side, then it will suit you better because the 990fx is more superior to the 970 chipset. Also the M5a97 has an ugly brown PCB but i'm not tripping because I don't have a case window. The M5a99fx has a nice looking black PCB but if you don't care about aesthetics much than it's not a problem really.
For every day use the M5a97 will run just fine. Just don't get the LE version. That one doesn't have heatsinks on the VRMs so you will have porblems. and when you have problems, you will be unhappy.
dO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE asROCK 970?
I would go with the Asrock. ASUS has been known in the past to sabotage AMD GPUs by disabling the IOMMU functionality needed for virtualization, going against AMD's explicit instructions that state that every motherboard should have it enabled. This kind of behavior should be discouraged.
Go for the Asus if you want the best stable board. the 4+2 powerphase and digi vrm´s are alot better quality then on the ASrock extreme 3, with only a 4+1 powerphase and analog cheapass vrm´s. Most things that ive read about those cheap asrock boards is missery. Same story with the gigabyte am3+ boards..But hey thats the reason why those fully loaded asrock board is cheap, because the power delivery is the part they cheaped out on! Cheap boards with alot of feutures are cheap for a reason..
Same story with the Msi-970A-G46 for example, an awesome board as far as feutures goes, "even" Sli support at 8x. But in therms of power delivery and connectivity its a piece of junk
I would say go with the Asus.