Best-looking AMD Motherboard?

[MahtXL]

asrock fatality, msi 990fxa gaming. i think the sabertooth is white if you are into that.

[Morgan MLGman]

10 hours ago, iiNNeX said:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-components/motherboards/amd?sPage=1&sSort=1

 

Nothing on there looks remotely good to me bar the MSI Gaming 970 and maybe the Gigabyte 990X. Still though, looks very outdated.

Oh really?
New ASUS Sabertooth:

ASRock 990FX Killer (I owned this one):

 

ASUS 970 Pro Gaming/Aura (a cheap, decent 970-based mobo)

 

 

ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z

 

MSI 990FXA Gaming:

 

Gigabyte 990X - Gaming SLI:

 

 

Gigabyte 990FX Gaming:

 

 

And that's only some of them from the top of my head.

[Prysin]

23 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

if i had to build a gaming rig for myself and there was only 2 CPU's available on the face of the earth: i3-6100 or FX-8320...i would for sure pick the FX...i do think it's better than a core i3 overall for gaming...in MOST games...at least in MANY games the required overall multi-threaded performance in modern games is indeed too great for the core i3 to handle...the AMD FX will not have amazing minimum FPS...and in some single-threaded heavy games it will slow down to a crawl...but at least it's a consistent crawl...and it will not stutter it's way out and piss you off...

 

BUT, the core i3 can be upgraded to the world's fastest processors without you needing a new motherboard, RAM etc...it's on a much newer and much better platform, more efficient, better features, faster etc. so for a new computer because of the fact that you can upgrade it to an i5-6500, i7-6700 and soon the i7-7700...for that very reason the i3-6100 is STILL a much better choice than locking yourself into a grossly outdated AMD platform in 2016.

 

PLEASE...think...do not counter argue this...do not disagree...cause if you do, you'll be answering the question i always wanted to ask you.

you are wrong.

the worlds fastest processor would by all means be on the LGA2011-V3 X99 platform in the form of the 10 core 20 thread 6950x. Both in terms of raw multi-threaded performance, memory bandwidth, PCIe lane capacity and so on. Although skylake will beat broadwell by a few % in single threaded performance at equal clocks.

 

i agree with the rest though.

 

Downside with Skylake is the entry cost. DDR4 is no longer a barrier, but the boards are shit. I would wholeheartedly agree that the skylake platform is better, i kinda regret not waiting 3 months to get the 6700k rather then my 4790k, however the  4790k was dropping in price due to stock clearing back then.

 

My issue with skylake is the same issue i have with FM2+, LGA 1150 and had for AM3+ for a VERY long time. Many boards, especially on the lower end ones, has ZERO cooling on the VRMs, some have a minute heatsink. This is not a problem with a i3 which is rated at 65w, but realistically is like 40-45w most of the time. However when you slap a 6600k or 6700k or 7700k, things change. These boards are now trying to handle 88w on a 3+1 phase setup with ZERO cooling.

 

My issue with Skylake, Haswell and FM2+ is that you need to increase board cost by a lot to get just a tiny bit of metal ontop of your VRMs to stop them from imploding. Second issue with Intel specifically is the lack of fast DDRx on sub Z chipsets. Digital foundry has showed how much it helps, and it absolutely RUINS the potential of lower end platforms in terms of price to perf.

 

As for multi-threading, yes FX is faster then i3s, hell even the 860k at 4.5Ghz is faster by a decent margin actually. A stock FX 6300 is a landslide victory.

 

Fun fact for you. FX 6xxx at 4.6GHz = i5 6500 in multi threaded perf. There is ONE point in CBR15 lead to FX :P. SIngle thread is still a good 60%+ worse then skylake. I happen to know this because i built a i5 6500 build for someone else, so i had some time to do a few quick benches jsut to test how fast skylake was with fast RAM (that rig has DDR4 3000MHz)

 

[Prysin]

29 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

asrock fatality, msi 990fxa gaming. i think the sabertooth is white if you are into that.

Sabertooth for AMD is military green/brown/black for the old gen (R2) and black/grey/brass (R3)

[maria2244]

my motherboard

GIGABYTE Z170X GAMING 5 with led on

[MahtXL]

Right right, i was thinking of the 

MSI 970A SLI Krait Edition

White and Black 970 chipset though so a bit of a feature loss, but still decent.

[Prysin]

1 minute ago, MahtXL said:

Right right, i was thinking of the 

MSI 970A SLI Krait Edition

White and Black 970 chipset though so a bit of a feature loss, but still decent.

oh you mean the BALLOFFUCKINGFIRE edition?

[MahtXL]

Just now, Prysin said:

oh you mean the BALLOFFUCKINGFIRE edition?

wouldnt know lol never owned one. Only ever had some cheap 760g asus board for a few years, and then this msi 990fxa for the last 6 months. Pretty bad reviews on the krait though, guess they skimped on the QC.

[Prysin]

2 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

wouldnt know lol never owned one. Only ever had some cheap 760g asus board for a few years, and then this msi 990fxa for the last 6 months. Pretty bad reviews on the krait though, guess they skimped on the QC.

there was no QC

 

the board had/has low end 3+1 VRM setup barely able to handle the quad core FX4xxx. Hell MSI themselves have at some point said NOT to use 8 cores in it. But retailers seem to not care and or have gotten that message.

[MahtXL]

2 minutes ago, Prysin said:

there was no QC

 

the board had/has low end 3+1 VRM setup barely able to handle the quad core FX4xxx. Hell MSI themselves have at some point said NOT to use 8 cores in it. But retailers seem to not care and or have gotten that message.

yeh msi said my board wouldnt run the 9k series but then a few months later updated the bios to be able to do so? 0_o i personally wouldnt run one of those in this board, pretty sure its only running a 6+2 and i wouldnt trust anything less than an 8+2 for a 9590. They seem to be very hit and miss when it comes to there amd boards.

[Prysin]

Just now, MahtXL said:

yeh msi said my board wouldnt run the 9k series but then a few months later updated the bios to be able to do so? 0_o i personally wouldnt run one of those in this board, pretty sure its only running a 6+2 and i wouldnt trust anything less than an 8+2 for a 9590. They seem to be very hit and miss when it comes to there amd boards.

MSI has been consistently using sub-par parts in their boards. Even their 990FX GAMING board is "lesser" then any competing 990FX board bar maybe some of the first 990FX boards that came out.

 

MSI is a "intel board" maker. They seem to just use the sub par leftovers for AMD boards. I would never reccomend a MSI board "lower" then the 990FX Gaming. Mostly because they are all shit and DANGEROUS.

 

They dont have VRM protection, several of them is based on AM3 and the power demands of Phenom II, which while being 125w wasnt actually as brutal as FX due to the lack of AVX and other later, more power hungry but powerful instruction sets.

 

MSI AM3+ boards rarely, if ever have proper ESD protection, so if you shock them with static, they often die.

 

their boards are prone to failure even on FX 8 series. Sure the Krait catching fire with the 9590 was spectacular, but plenty of their boards die, although less spectacularily, from too high current.

 

Oh and lets not forget that their features are atleast 2 generations behind their competitors.

 

 

[i_build_nanosuits]

22 minutes ago, Prysin said:

FX 6xxx at 4.6GHz = i5 6500 in multi threaded perf. 

SIngle thread is still a good 60%+ worse then skylake.

that -60% in single-threaded performance will have an impact on gaming that will vary from negligeable in well optmised multi-threaded GPU heavy games such as battlefield/battlefront for example all the way down to deal breaker when it comes to games that have heavily load on 1, 2 or 3 CPU threads such as Dying light, arma 3, dayz, just about any assassin's creed or far cry game just to name a few.

 

Now yes the FX-6300 is cheaper...noticeably cheaper in fact...but IMHO you get what you pay for, and in some instances will disapoint and make you feel like you don't even get your money's worth depending on what you do...the i5-6500 is more expensive but can be paired with cheap ass motherboards and you can use the intel cooler just fine on it...so the overall cost for something like an FX-8350, a decent board ready for overclocking with at least 6 power phase and CPU heatsinks, and a decent CPU cooler will still be cheaper, but not by much...

 

Anyways, i have no problem recommending an FX-8320 with a cheaper 970 chipset board for a cheap workstation machine (i did just yesterday in fact) but for a modern day gaming rig...hummm i'm having a hard time because i know for a fact that the intel i5 will perform noticeably better in 10 games out of 10...and upgrade path...new platform...ddr4...efficiency...all that stuff you know the drill

[MahtXL]

Just now, Prysin said:

MSI has been consistently using sub-par parts in their boards. Even their 990FX GAMING board is "lesser" then any competing 990FX board bar maybe some of the first 990FX boards that came out.

 

MSI is a "intel board" maker. They seem to just use the sub par leftovers for AMD boards. I would never reccomend a MSI board "lower" then the 990FX Gaming. Mostly because they are all shit and DANGEROUS.

 

They dont have VRM protection, several of them is based on AM3 and the power demands of Phenom II, which while being 125w wasnt actually as brutal as FX due to the lack of AVX and other later, more power hungry but powerful instruction sets.

 

MSI AM3+ boards rarely, if ever have proper ESD protection, so if you shock them with static, they often die.

 

their boards are prone to failure even on FX 8 series. Sure the Krait catching fire with the 9590 was spectacular, but plenty of their boards die, although less spectacularily, from too high current.

 

Oh and lets not forget that their features are atleast 2 generations behind their competitors.

 

 

The socket temps on this board are stupid high, even brand new out of the box it was above there "safe zone" oh well, im onward to z170a in 4 weeks anyways so as long as it holds out until then no big deal, its been a great board, all the features i needed, price was great to, but the power phase and vrm issues make me glad im moving on.

[MahtXL]

1 minute ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

that -60% in single-threaded performance will have an impact on gaming that will vary from negligeable in well optmised multi-threaded GPU heavy games such as battlefield/battlefront for example all the way down to deal breaker when it comes to games that have heavily load on 1, 2 or 3 CPU threads such as Dying light, arma 3, dayz, just about any assassin's creed or far cry game just to name a few.

 

Now yes the FX-6300 is cheaper...noticeably cheaper in fact...but IMHO you get what you pay for, and in some instances will disapoint and make you feel like you don't even get your money's worth depending on what you do...the i5-6500 is more expensive but can be paired with cheap ass motherboards and you can use the intel cooler just fine on it...so the overall cost for something like an FX-8350, a decent board ready for overclocking with at least 6 power phase and CPU heatsinks, and a decent CPU cooler will still be cheaper, but not by much...

 

Anyways, i have no problem recommending an FX-8320 with a cheaper 970 chipset board for a cheap workstation machine (i did just yesterday in fact) but for a modern day gaming rig...hummm i'm having a hard time because i know for a fact that the intel i5 will perform noticeably better in 10 games out of 10.

Agree if you dont already own an FX cpu, do not sink any money into one, im moving to skylake for a reason, 98 percent of games run fine sure, but for that other 2 percent the problems arent just minor they are game breaking. GTA V refuses to run properly for me, BF4 has nasty stutters and fps drops while playing on 64 man servers, etc etc. the 8350 at the time i bought it was fantastic, but it just cant cut it anymore, and no fancy motherboard will fix that, trust me i thought my 990fxa board would get rid of my issues, it didnt. Spend the money on an i5, even with the cheapest mobo, its going to be better.

[i_build_nanosuits]

7 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

Agree if you dont already own an FX cpu, do not sink any money into one, im moving to skylake for a reason, 98 percent of games run fine sure, but for that other 2 percent the problems arent just minor they are game breaking. GTA V refuses to run properly for me, BF4 has nasty stutters and fps drops while playing on 64 man servers, etc etc. the 8350 at the time i bought it was fantastic, but it just cant cut it anymore, and no fancy motherboard will fix that, trust me i thought my 990fxa board would get rid of my issues, it didnt. Spend the money on an i5, even with the cheapest mobo, its going to be better.

suttering in BF4?

wow i wasn't expecting that...honestly i do play A LOT of battlefield 4 (at least i used to...now i play more battlefront for some reason even though the game is worse i like it go figure :p) but anyways yeah i used to play BF4 on FX-8320 + GTX 780 and if there was ONE game in my library that would run EPIC on this setup was BF4...the GPU load was maxing out pretty much consistently and i was getting good FPS...in fact, when i first came in this forum i was a very huge AMD FX fanboy and i defended that CPU heart and soul and i even made videos to show guys (Faceman and Faa you guys probably won't remember them...they used to bash on AMD FX all day long) until they proved me wrong when i started playing a wide variety of titles and i started monitoring my GPU loads in games i quickly went to the conclusion that my AMD FX overclocked to 4.4ghz was no match for my GTX 780 at the time...but BF4 oh man...look i made this video to show Faa how BF4 ran on this...as you can see it run very well...then i played hitman absolution and assassin's creed 4 and many other games where the FX just fell flat you know, we are ALL wrong at some point i guess...but watch this running it's interesting...100$ CPU...

 

[Prysin]

20 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

that -60% in single-threaded performance will have an impact on gaming that will vary from negligeable in well optmised multi-threaded GPU heavy games such as battlefield/battlefront for example all the way down to deal breaker when it comes to games that have heavily load on 1, 2 or 3 CPU threads such as Dying light, arma 3, dayz, just about any assassin's creed or far cry game just to name a few.

 

Now yes the FX-6300 is cheaper...noticeably cheaper in fact...but IMHO you get what you pay for, and in some instances will disapoint and make you feel like you don't even get your money's worth depending on what you do...the i5-6500 is more expensive but can be paired with cheap ass motherboards and you can use the intel cooler just fine on it...so the overall cost for something like an FX-8350, a decent board ready for overclocking with at least 6 power phase and CPU heatsinks, and a decent CPU cooler will still be cheaper, but not by much...

 

Anyways, i have no problem recommending an FX-8320 with a cheaper 970 chipset board for a cheap workstation machine (i did just yesterday in fact) but for a modern day gaming rig...hummm i'm having a hard time because i know for a fact that the intel i5 will perform noticeably better in 10 games out of 10.

actually, go to PcPartpicker and start looking. Only a select few boards are "cheap" that has better then 4+1 phase power delivery and VRM heatsinks.

Most sub 120$ boards doesnt even have 6+2 phase. I would run a unlocked i7 on less then 6+2  phase. THe CPU is expensive, and skylake is more sensitive to voltage fluctuations then most of the older stuff. Just because you can doesnt mean you should.

 

Just because you CAN run FX 8350 on a ASRock 970m Pro3 mATX 4+1 phase board, jsut because its proven and tested to handle 4.4GHz OC at said board doesnt make it a GOOD choice. It just makes it a option.

 

I have to pick on you for being so "inconsiderate" of intel boards. Their TDP is lower, but their clock control is much more fine grained. Thus they require much finer voltage control.

FX just turbos to max speed and stays there until some program tells it to go to a lower C state. Sadly, most programs use a intel optimized compiler, so FX will just keep powering to max turbo at all times because intels compiler codes doesnt give a shit about AMD clock speeds or power control.

 

I think, the price to perf is a bit skewed in the sense of some FX products. Personally i would only reccomend the 6350, and 8350. As they both come with teh Wraith cooler (Hyper 212) as stock. This is a added value, and having a solid performing heatsink that will drop right into a AM4 ZEN board is great value going forward (assuming not all ZEN products come with that cooler. Would be amazing to have a Hyper 212 stock on AMDs next "i3" equivalent)

 

10 games out of 10 is true if you only look at FPS numbers. In that regards the G3258 is hands down a monster.

If you look at frame times/99th percentile stuff, things are murkier in the bigger picture but devastating for both sides in single cases. Sadly not enough reviewers does such tests, and they are crucial in order to tell consumers how well a product will be perceived.

 

Another annoying metric that no review site bothers with is "actual use". Not many people boot into a barebones windows install and run a series of games in a clinical enviroment. People have AVs, skype, spotify, chrome w/youtube streams, teamspeak, fraps etc... things like these that eat into the CPU usage. Fewer cores are perfect in a benching scenario, it would be interesting to see how much a difference HT and or extra cores has on such factors, especially if we assume every core uses 4 cores.

 

Fun fact though, apparently it is a bitch to properly multi-thread any game above 3 cores without it having engine based bottlenecks. Although in theory any workload can be multi-threaded with 8 lines of code copy pasted throughout your software. Yes, it is THAT easy to have a perfectly scalable and controllable multi-threaded workload. I bet that you could dissect DX8, insert those 8 lines of codes where possible and have it perform 3-4 times better.

Yes, @patrickjp93 is correct when he makes those claims about how simple multi threading is.

[MahtXL]

4 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

suttering in BF4?

wow i wasn't expecting that...honestly i do play A LOT of battlefield 4 (at least i used to...now i play more battlefront for some reason even though the game is worse i like it go figure :p) but anyways yeah i used to play BF4 on FX-8320 + GTX 780 and if there was ONE game in my library that would run EPIC on this setup was BF4...the GPU load was maxing out pretty much consistently and i was getting good FPS...in fact, when i first came in this forum i was a very huge AMD FX fanboy and i defended that CPU heart and soul and i even made videos to show guys (Faceman and Faa you guys probably won't remember them...they used to bash on AMD FX all day long) until they proved me wrong when i started playing a wide variety of titles and i started monitoring my GPU loads in games i quickly went to the conclusion that my AMD FX overclocked to 4.4ghz was no match for my GTX 780 at the time...but BF4 oh man...look i made this video to show Faa how BF4 ran on this...as you can see it run very well...then i played hitman absolution and assassin's creed 4 and many other games where the FX just fell flat you know, we are ALL wrong at some point i guess...but watch this running it's interesting...100$ CPU...

 

even on absolute ultra settings my gpu use wont go above 65 to 70. it spikes up to 100 when something blows up, otherwise it just refuses to hit 100, though i am running at 1080p, and i am using a 390 so its probly just not a game that can fully stress a 390, especially mine thats aggressively overclocked. Add in the higher cpu overhead of radeon gpus and there you have it. a nice 8350 bottleneck.

[patrickjp93]

7 minutes ago, Prysin said:

I think, the price to perf is a bit skewed in the sense of some FX products. Personally i would only reccomend the 6350, and 8350. As they both come with teh Wraith cooler (Hyper 212) as stock. This is a added value, and having a solid performing heatsink that will drop right into a AM4 ZEN board is great value going forward (assuming not all ZEN products come with that cooler. Would be amazing to have a Hyper 212 stock on AMDs next "i3" equivalent)

The 8370/e has the Wraith Cooler now as well, and they are new bins, so there might be greater overclocking headroom on them now.

[Prysin]

6 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

even on absolute ultra settings my gpu use wont go above 65 to 70. it spikes up to 100 when something blows up, otherwise it just refuses to hit 100, though i am running at 1080p, and i am using a 390 so its probly just not a game that can fully stress a 390, especially mine thats aggressively overclocked. Add in the higher cpu overhead of radeon gpus and there you have it. a nice 8350 bottleneck.

are you using Mantle or DX11???

 

[MahtXL]

6 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

even on absolute ultra settings my gpu use wont go above 65 to 70. it spikes up to 100 when something blows up, otherwise it just refuses to hit 100, though i am running at 1080p, and i am using a 390 so its probly just not a game that can fully stress a 390, especially mine thats aggressively overclocked.

DX11, mantle didnt offer any performance boost for me, and actually ran worse in some cases, like worse fps drops and more occasional stutters/hiccups, sure the gpu use of mantle would be higher than with dx 11, but it just ran so much worse, and the recent drivers broke it anyways. So i stick to dx11 which overall has a slightly lower frame rate, but the drops arent as bad, and the stutters are less frequent. Mantle was always a beta anyways.

[Prysin]

1 minute ago, patrickjp93 said:

The 8370/e has the Wraith Cooler now as well, and they are new bins, so there might be greater overclocking headroom on them now.

not the e. Only the following CPUs has Wraith

FM2+ 880k

FM2+ 7890k

AM3+ FX 6350

AM3+ FX 8350

AM3+ FX 8370

 

However the cost of the 8370 and 7890k makes them useless to even consider.

No APU benefit from CPU speed, as the AMD microcode instructs the CPU to throttle to 3GHz during GPU loads higher then X% of the GPU capacity. This means that a 7890k will be no better then a 7870k. The only reason the 7870k and 7890k beats a 7850k is because the iGPU of the 7870k and 7890k is clocked to 866Mhz compared to 720Mhz for the 7850k.

[i_build_nanosuits]

9 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

even on absolute ultra settings my gpu use wont go above 65 to 70. it spikes up to 100 when something blows up, otherwise it just refuses to hit 100, though i am running at 1080p, and i am using a 390 so its probly just not a game that can fully stress a 390, especially mine thats aggressively overclocked. Add in the higher cpu overhead of radeon gpus and there you have it. a nice 8350 bottleneck.

yup...AMD dx11 drivers...GPU well known to require a powerful CPU...look how much better it run on nvidia hardware with AMD CPU's

but anyways, the FX is still a powerful CPU and will do a good job in many if not most games...but there are some games where it'll run like arse and will be the cause for 30FPS gaming...dying light for example is a modern game built on a modern game engine...now go to youtube and type ''DYING LIGHT AMD FX'' and pick some with higher end cards that show GPU loads...it's a shit show...30FPS...GPU load 55%...that kind of jazz...where as even a core i3 will run that game brilliantly (not the case for many other games...there are a lot of games that will saturate the core i3 to no end and will be the case for unplayable stuttering at times.) like i said...AMD FX is slow...but consistently slow...which IMHO is better than a CPU that push 125FPS at times...but stutter and 24FPS the next second.

[Prysin]

3 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

yup...AMD dx11 drivers...GPU well known to require a powerful CPU...look how much better it run on nvidia hardware with AMD CPU's

but anyways, the FX is still a powerful CPU and will do a good job in many if not most games...but there are some games where it'll run like arse and will be the cause for 30FPS gaming...dying light for example is a modern game built on a modern game engine...now go to youtube and type ''DYING LIGHT AMD FX'' and pick some with higher end cards that show GPU loads...it's a shit show...30FPS...GPU load 55%...that kind of jazz...where as even a core i3 will run that game brilliantly (not the case for many other games...there are a lot of games that will saturate the core i3 to no end and will be the case for unplayable stuttering at times.) like i said...AMD FX is slow...but consistently slow...which IMHO is better than a CPU that push 125FPS at times...but stutter and 24FPS the next second.

well, for BF4, AMD can use Mantle. Which is proven to destroy DX11 perf of any of the CPU makers. Would be interesting to see how the 8350 does if he goes into Mantle. You never got to test that since you dont have a AMD GPU.

 

Dying Light is a Nvidia "only" title. Anything AMD runs like ass in that game. Even with a 4790k its completely shit.

 

Arma 3 saw little improvement going from OCd FX 8320 to 4790k actually. What did help was changing the 295x2 for a GTX 950. Again, dont even think there is AMD drivers for that game.

[MahtXL]

Just now, Prysin said:

well, for BF4, AMD can use Mantle. Which is proven to destroy DX11 perf of any of the CPU makers. Would be interesting to see how the 8350 does if he goes into Mantle. You never got to test that since you dont have a AMD GPU.

 

 

I explained above my experience with mantle on my 8350, higher fps, at the cost of worse drops, and more stutter.

[Prysin]

2 minutes ago, MahtXL said:

I explained above my experience with mantle on my 8350, higher fps, at the cost of worse drops, and more stutter.

didnt see it since you quoted yourself, instead of me.