Hello guys! I am building a gaming rig soon and I would like to know some good choices for z77 motherboards! I am currently interested in the MSI Mpower Big bang and the Asus Sabertooth z77. Anyone have any experience with these boards? and any other recommendations? Thanks in advance.
~YoJoe360
the UD3H or UP4 from gigabyte if you want to save some money, or the UD5H, UP5 or Mpower for a higher budget, all of these boards have absolutley solid features, and a great power delivery system.
The Msi Z77 Mpower my personal favorite of all Z77 boards. ☺ every mpower board comes handtested out of fabrick, msi tests every single board with an i5 A 4.6 ghz prime test for 24 hours before they left fabrick, so that means the board is great ☺
Personal opnion for brands are ASUS or Gigabyte.
I just built a gaming system for a customer with a Sabertooth, the "armor" looks good, if "wow factor" is a considertion in the build.
I personaly have an ASUS p68 pro/gen3, and love it for overclocking.
No personal experience with Gigabyte boards, but next build may have one, they look to have a better 'value'
I also recommend you check out some of the higher end ASRock Boards, like the Extreme6 and Extreme9. You could be getting a lot of options for a better price compared to MSI and Asus.
I use an ASRock motherboard in my rig and its very good. It's got some really helpful features like Dr. Debug, which gives you a code to let you know if you're encountering any errors. And since I'm an occassional overclocker, its really helpful to have a Clear CMOS button at the back that helps me reset things really easily if I push my hardware too much.
I have personal experience with Biostar, Foxconn, MSI, and ASUS.
Boards to stay away from: Biostar, MSI
Boards to keep: ASUS
And foxconn of course make pretty decent boards for what they are, but there's always the ethics question that comes into it.
Anyway, here's what happened with me. Biostar board failed after 6 months, replaced it with a Foxconn that a friend recommended and it's been working ever since I got it in 2009.
I got an MSI board for a new build, which I quickly regret buying. The bios that came with the board was flat out impossible to use. There were 6 different ways to update the bios and only one of them worked, so I spent at least a few hours trying to update my bios. After I got the bios updated, everything worked, but then I found out the board had a defect across every single Z68A-GD80 ever made where it would throttle the CPU if you took the multiplier above 47. After all that bullshit, the motherboard stopped recognizing SLI a few months later.
At that point I bought an ASUS board to replace it and haven't looked back.
I can definitely vouche for ASUS, and I've heard that Gigabyte boards are nice as well, but it seems you get one or two bad models every generation with Gigabyte and then the rest of their lineup works fine.
For the price range, those are good boards. Gygabite has some good boards in that $175-225 price range. The savertooth is good, but you need to install the optional cooling fan if you get it, OR have a CPU cooler than directs air down into the armor.The Mpower is a good design for overclocking, so if you want high overclocks, then take a look at that. The Gygabites come with msata, which is a nice feature for the fastest SSD storage possible (without giving up PCI-e slots).
This is an very old topic that got bumped up, i suppose that topic starter allready buyed his board.
so i close this topic for now.
Grtz Angel ☺