I'm looking to use this board in a build. I'm planning to pair an AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE with a Saphire Radeon HD 7850 and overclocking both of them as much as I safely can. Does this board fair well with OCing? I'm not looking for top notch performance, it is only a $100 dollar board after all. I just want to know if i'll be able to get a good overclock on the board. And if not, what would be a nice board around the $100 dollar mark that OCs good?
I have had this board and i can tell you that if you have any intention of using Crossfire / SLI then dont get it.
The PCI-e slots are x16 x4 so the second card will run like a sack of potatos.
I dont know how much it is in dollars, but for around £80 the Asrock 990fx Extreme 3 is insanly good preformance for money although the BIOS is a little wierd. The Asrock for crossfire has 16x 16x 4x, 2usb 3.0 and a bunch of 6gb sata ports.
Honestly, the quad phenoms arnt bad, but IMHO i would save for a better cpu. If you already have the Phenom from a past computer, go ahead although that may/may not bottle neck the 7850. not sure about that one.
PS: The 7850 2gb dual-x from sapphire overclocks sooo nicely, and stays really cool and is even silent at stock clock speeds.
The M5A97 is a great motherboard for the price if you're only running a single card. It can overclock a 965 very far. I have my same setup as the one you're looking at clocked to over 4ghz without a problem. The 965 has more than enough power to feed a 7850, it can even feed a 7950 if you overclock the northbridge (NB is the Phenom II's only weak spot). I also believe Asus has far better software to monitor and interact with your bios/hardware from inside your windows than any other motherboard manufacturer.
pwntarts is on the money the UEFI and PWM and VRM handle overclocking without any issues. Really the main consideration is if you need SLI or Crossfire. Keep in mind though that brings in alot of other varibles. If you really think you need that as an option though you could consider the M5A99X EVO R2.0
Hope this helps. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
ihave the M5A97 evo r2.0 in my system, and it´s a great mainboard.
If you only gonne use a single gpu, then this is one of the best mainbords to buy for the price.
Those Asrock boards are shit, i readed much about crashed and unstability wenn overclocking, and in a few cases only mainboard espascialy the extreme 4 burned VRM´s
so i personaly have the best experiance with asus and msi mainboards.
ive you gonne run 1 gpu, then i say but the M5A97 evo if you need crosfire or sli support, then go for the M5A99FX all the way :)
And about overclocking, thats good with this board, it hase the same capability's as the M5A99FX pro, and i guess the same same capability´s as the sabbertooh 990 fx :) cause they all have the same bios ;)
I agree. I have this same board and OCing a 965 on it is a piece of cake. I got 4.2 out of it (stable) without even trying. I've had mine to 4.4 without any Prime crashes, but still backed it off because I don't really trust the pump on my H100 not to go out. It's plenty fast and temps are stable enough for what I do anyways.
Like Hammond said, Crossfire on it is pretty much useless even though I run twin 2 gig 6850s on mine. The 2nd PCIe slot is not completely worthless, but it isnt great either. Its worth another 10fps in BF3 and a couple points on Futuremark.