Can I buy any motherboard if I am not overclocking?

Hardware Hub Motherboards
1

I am using an AMD A-10 5800k FM2 socket and i wanna know, do i need to buy an uber-expensive board or can i just buy any old crap? (that supports the APU obviously)

Thanks in advance

2

you should always buy a decent motherboard. it doesn't have to be expensive just good quality.

if you dont wanna oc you dont have to but buying boards with quality caps and the likes will help keep your pc stable across its life.

if you buy cheap boards theres always a chance of it swelling the caps regardless of whether you oc or not.

asus and gigabyte are my 2 fave suppliers.

1 thing i would say is buy the board you need. if you dont want to run sli/crossfire then get a board with 1 pci-e x16 slot rather than multiples.

stay clear of via chipsets as they tend to be the cheap and scrimp on parts like using pci-e 1.1 rather than pci-e 2 because they can save money just because cards are backwards compatible for the most part.

(edited for dyslexic typing)

3

>Any motherboard

>Not OCing

Pick one

 

4

 

pretty simple on the APU front.

the A55 boards are junk.  skip it unless you're aiming for an HTPC (which you won't be buying an A10 for anyway, so skip it); no SATA3 support, no xfire support, no overclocking support, no usb3.0 support... the list goes on.

the A75 boards are solid.  

  • Generally they don't overclock well, but that means nothing to you since you aren't planning on overclocking.   
  • It doesn't support crossfire (which again makes no difference, since generally with an APU you'll be aiming for dual graphics not xfire, as you can't use the A10's onchip GPU when you're xfireing GPUs on a build... in short you can chose only one... xfire or dual graphics, you can't do both with the existing APU arcitecture.  
  • the onchip APU only supports 3 monitors.

the A85 is probably too much board for 95% of good APU setups.

  • generally boards with this chipset are build for great overclocking, which would be the only real advantage to it for an APU owner
  • you can xfire, which is a feature most APU owners wouldn't be looking for; though it is just pcie 2.0 x8/x8 xfire... which is fine for everything on the market for the most part... with only a little drop off seen on the highest end gpus at those speeds.
  • Ideal gaming chipset for a build with one of the Athlon II X4 750; which just goes to show you, this chipset really is for people who aren't going to use an APU's onchip graphics.
  • gain a 4th monitor with on chip graphics

hope this breakdown helps.