Board and GPU incompatibility?

cragger89 · June 8, 2015

Guys,

Over the weekend, I replaced my motherboard. The reason for this, the Gigabyte H81M-S2H was doing something to hold back performance, to the tune of 20-30fps in GTA V. The card is an XFX R7870, rest of the build is an i3 4160 CPU, 8GB (2x4GB) RAM.

The GPU was delivered to my work place, so I installed it in my i5 3550/8GB (2x4GB) work PC and in GTA V with medium settings, I achieved 66fps minimum. In my home PC, it dropped by 20-30fps using the same settings. I tried different RAM and doing a fresh install of Windows, but the problem remained. I tried putting the GPU in a work PC which had the same i3 4160 CPU and RAM spec, but the board was a Gigabyte H97-D3H. In this, the performance was matched with what I observed on my i5 work PC.

I spent £66 on the ASRock ZX97M Pro4 board and the problem is resolved. What I want to know is, is there an actual technical difference between the boards which would hinder performance in a game? I know the chipset is different, but I thought the PCI Express specs were the same? Just interested to know, more than anything. I specced the build as I did because at the time, I wasn't a gamer. Buying a cheap board then wasn't an issue, but the performance drop is very, very noticeable.