Did I screw up?

[DraconicFire98]

So, a few months ago I got myself an AsRock H97 Anniversary, and at the time I thought it would do me well... and the more i upgrade around it, the more I notice the bottlenecks it has, like the ONE pcie x16 slot and the 5 pcie x1 slots

 

Then i realized the critical mistake of it only supporting max 1600mhz ddr3 (ddr3 is fine, the speed is what scares me)

Full atx is fine, I got a cheap sleeper case that fits it just fine

 

Did i screw up?

[alexhelvetica]

No, it is fine. All is fine. 

What is your computers specs? 

[iRileyx]

The ram speed won't really make much difference.

And unless you'll actually need to use a second pci x16 slot, you shouldn't need to worry about only having the one

[DraconicFire98]

4 minutes ago, Comic_Sans_MS said:

No, it is fine. All is fine. 

What is your computers specs? 

Currently it's a 980Ti Asus strix 6gb, 8gb ram (planning on upgrading to 16gb soon because video editing and whatnot), i5-4460, Gonna upgrade to a i7-4790k soon (don't have plans to overclock, but the 4790k is faster than the 4790 out of the box)

[alexhelvetica]

Just now, DraconicFire98 said:

Currently it's a 980Ti Asus strix 6gb, 8gb ram (planning on upgrading to 16gb soon because video editing and whatnot), i5-4460, Gonna upgrade to a i7-4790k soon 

The only downside to this motherboard I see us that you cannot OC on it, the other feature may be limited, but you would probably not need a second PCIe 16x slot or need faster RAM. 

[K0NA]

I have done some tests, with ram speeds and it didnt make alot of performance boost with 2133mhz than 1600mhz so wouldnt worry about it.

 

 

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

40 minutes ago, DraconicFire98 said:

Then i realized the critical mistake of it only supporting max 1600mhz ddr3 (ddr3 is fine, the speed is what scares me)

 

Regarding RAM speed, all H97 (or any other post Sandy Bridge intel board) will support 1600MHz DDR3 officially. Everything above that is considered memory overclock. Some boards will officially claim to support particular levels of memory OC as well, but in the end you'll only know when you try. The motherboard does support XMP, so it's a matter of loading it and seeing.

 

Anyway, 1600 it's still standard speed for that platform, and you would be surprised by the amount of people who bought DDR3 rated at greater speeds, never entered BIOS to enable the XMP, and therefore always ran their systems at 1600MHz  

 

The way I see it, you could only have "screwed up" by buying a motherboard that doesn't allow you to plug all your other components. If you have room for everything right now, then you did well. Upgrade possibilities? You'll get to that when you need it, if ever. I know how marketing can make us feel that we could have spent a little extra for that 3-way crossfire option, even though we just have one GPU and won't ever a second one, not to mention third...

You are more likely to end up plugging a sound card, or network/USB/SATA/RAID controller in the 1x slot at some point that using the 16x one (and if you did have another 16x, you would still be more likely to use it as a x4 slot for SSDs or other expansion cards).

Paraphrasing Linus, get the best bang for buck you can for today, rather than double-guessing what you will want at some unspecified future.

[DraconicFire98]

So i didn't screw up, that's nice.

[incarnate]

If you aren't going to sli then 1 16x slot is fine

 

Ram speed doesn't matter with ddr3. It's more important with ddr4.

 

A kit of 2133 mhz ram would probably work fine anyway, unless the h chipsets don't support xmp (Not quite sure off the top of my head). Even then. I have 1600 mhz cl 8 ram and my pc runs beautifully.