Hi guys I am busy upgrading my pc from a prebuild dell workstation in which i slapped a 970 to a custom build. I have a reasonable budget and so far i have selected the following:
the issue I have is with the MOBO, it has been a while since I made a PC And three motherboards which are all rather good are about the same price and I was wondering if anyone had any experience or opinions on which mobo would be better and why. The three motherboards in question are:
ASUS Z170-A ASUS Z170 PRO gaming MSI Z170A Gaming Pro carbon
Any tips on my build are welcome (I will mostly use it for gamign with the additional use of some CFD calculations for uni (which run completely fine on a i5 ;) )
I have the Asus Z170-A and it has been great for me. It was one of the few z170 boards that had a legacy PCI slot, which is the main reason I chose it over something else. I would just pick the one with the features you need, and if you have a brand preference.
All of the msi hardware I have used has been perfectly fine, but that is not really a good measure. If I were to get new hardware now I would skip asus because of their customer support reputation.
I have a MSI Gaming 7 as my daily. Never had any issues, and it was used from a friend who also never had issues. So i would say MSI is fine.
These all look nice, but I guess I would be curious as to if you really need everything on those boards- for example, I notice you only listed one GPU- do you plan on getting any more GPUs? Otherwise you have extra PCI-e slots you won't use. You can usually shave a significant amount off, depending on what you're looking at.
MSI has an online forum. You can check it out and see if your board is mentioned. https://forum-en.msi.com My A68hm-e33 has reliable and has never failed. When I decided to go dual graphics with it is when I had wished I had visited the forum. I should note that my model is their cheapest one and came free with the APU. It even handled a nice OC on the iGPU