Budget Overclocking Board Comparison for Pentium G3258

[Aereldor]

Hello. I'm planning to build a budget gaming PC, and chose to go with the Pentium g3258 for the better upgrade path than its AMD counterpart, the Athlon X4 860k.

The build also incorporates a GTX 960.
 

I'm stuck between a choice of two motherboards-

1) The Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H (https://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gab85mds3h),
As recommended here-

However, the 1.2v limit on the motherboard probably won't let me get past 4.2GHz (although on the plus side, I can stick with the stock heatsink)

 

2) The MSI H81m-e34 (https://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-motherboard-h81mp33)

 

This seems to be the H81M-P33 with more USB 3.0 ports and USB 3.0 headers. However, this only comes with a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot. Do you know if this, rather than a PCI-E 3.0 slot will affect GPU performance? Also, does this board also have a voltage limit that limits overclocking?

If you know of any better motherboards for a similarly LOW PRICE, please do not hesitate to mention them.

Thank you for your time,
Aereldor.

[TheSLSAMG]

Hello. I'm planning to build a budget gaming PC, and chose to go with the Pentium g3258 for the better upgrade path than its AMD counterpart, the Athlon X4 860k.

The build also incorporates a GTX 960.

 

I'm stuck between a choice of two motherboards-

1) The Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H (https://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gab85mds3h),

As recommended here-

However, the 1.2v limit on the motherboard probably won't let me get past 4.2GHz (although on the plus side, I can stick with the stock heatsink)

 

2) The MSI H81m-e34 (https://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-motherboard-h81mp33)

 

This seems to be the H81M-P33 with more USB 3.0 ports and USB 3.0 headers. However, this only comes with a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot. Do you know if this, rather than a PCI-E 3.0 slot will affect GPU performance? Also, does this board also have a voltage limit that limits overclocking?

If you know of any better motherboards for a similarly LOW PRICE, please do not hesitate to mention them.

Thank you for your time,

Aereldor.

First off, from a G3258/GTX 960 user, don't buy the G3258. For most games, it's not an adequate chip. Older games and games that can't utilize more than two cores will be fine, but anything more recent will bottleneck hard.

 

If you really want to get one instead of something better like an i3 though, I don't really know. Looking around online though I see a fair amount of people with issues overclocking on the MSI board, but I also see some that have been successful.

[Aereldor]

First off, from a G3258/GTX 960 user, don't buy the G3258. For most games, it's not an adequate chip. Older games and games that can't utilize more than two cores will be fine, but anything more recent will bottleneck hard.

 

If you really want to get one instead of something better like an i3 though, I don't really know. Looking around online though I see a fair amount of people with issues overclocking on the MSI board, but I also see some that have been successful.

 

In that case, what would you recommend? Getting something beefier like an i3-4160 will force me to cut back on the GPU- probably to a R9 270x or lower. The only other alternative at this price would be the Athlon X4 860k- how do you think that will compete?