Hello guys. Is the Asus B85 PRO Gamer a good motherboard?
Hmm, it does have a lot of features, however it only has one PCIe 3.0 slot and the second PCIe 2.0 slot seems to run at 4x when it's not being used as a secondary slot.
Also the fact that it does not support SLI confirms my PCIe 2.0 suspicions that i cannot run in 8x mode when pairing up with another card. CrossfireX has lower bandwidth requirements than SLI.
So it it seems to me that your expansion options are limited to crossfire if you want to do that, and if you do, you'll be getting a performance hit due to the bandwidth differences between 16x and 4x. Although I'm not quite sure how much of a performance hit.
A motherboard is good depending on your needs and features/price/performance ratios. If you don't plan to crossfire or SLI then I think this is a good board...although I could not find the price online so I can't judge by price, but if you want to run a dual card configuration down the road...or at least have to option to do so. Look elsewhere.
it looks like a very nice board to me. if i look quickly over it, then i see it has indeed some nice feutures to offer. 6+2 powerphase digi vrm's look also fine to me. It will probably be not the best overclocker, due some chipset limitations. But still, if you not realy interessted in that, it looks like a nice board to me. 4xsata 6gb/s 2xsata 3gb/s
p.s B85 chipset boards dont support sli
i think there are better motherboards on that price range. but if it has everything you want and the other boards doesn't than yah it's a good board.