I was cruisin' ebay, and I managed to snag this:
(Uh, the most important thing to note is the price. But it is a Gigabyte FM2A88X-UP4.)
The tinkerer in me could not resist.
Out with the old!
In with the new!
aaaaaaaaaaaaand the near finished product:
Sadly, it appears that I lost on the silicon lottery. My core temperatures are maxing out at 52C, but I have hit my voltage ceiling of 1.475 - I did not manage to achieve stability at 4.6ghz, so right now I am testing at 4.5ghz.
This is the first Gigabyte board I have ever owned, and I have to say I am fairly pleased with it. I like the clean, matte-black look, and it feels quite ruggedly solid. The BIOS was a little weird to navigate, but I have some pretty good overclocking options to mess with.
Anyway, sorry for the poor quality images. They were after a second-thought thing for a project I set for myself on my day off.
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cool project, just $23,- bucks for that mobo damm
Yeah!
I originally wanted to get my hands on an 990FX-UD3, but nabbing a decent revision for a bargain can be tough. Just for funsies, I checked to see what was available in FM2/FM2+ socket, and bam, boom goes the dynamite.
I wish I would have put a lot more forethought into taking pictures. Instead of just a "before" and "after" I would have shown some of the big differences in the construction of the motherboard - the Gigabyte board had a noticeably thicker PCB. The Biostar A85W was a decent board, but you didn't expect to get too far with your tinkering.
Oh shush. If Biostar was as bad as a lot of people made them out to be, they wouldn't exist as a company. I have owned multiple Biostar boards, and they have not given me a lick of trouble.
But, I do get where you're coming from - even now you do not purchase any board by Biostar if you expect to have much in terms of enthusiast features.
i've own two and they both died during the exact same overclock attempt :\
Pics or it didn't happen.
There are people who have had horror stories with all brands. shrugs
