Will I see a difference in performance?

iwt · Jul 14, 2014

Well currently I have a Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 rev. 3 motherboard, and I've been told a couple of times that it's holding me back. I have a Fx8320 OCed to 4.2Ghz with a 2 fan Hyper 212 Evo. Under a load it gets ~35 degrees. I also have a GTX 660. I was planning to buy a 2nd 660 because times are changing and this single card won't cut it, but I was told that the GA970D3 doesnt support SLI, so today I bought a GA-990FXA-UD3. I was wondering if I'd see any sort of change in performance when I get the motherboard?

Deus Gladiorum · Jul 14, 2014

No, that's very unlikely unless you had a PCIe slot that wasn't performing at full capacity or something. Motherboards don't really have any impact on performance. If there is a difference, it's super negligible. However, the advantage of a GA-990FXA-UD3 over your previous motherboard is usually better voltage regulation and so you have a much higher chance of overclocking your FX-8320 to something around 4.5 or 4.6 GHz now. However, prepare to be bottlenecked pretty heavily in certain games with that 660 SLI setup.

I have an FX-6300 @ 4.5 GHz and the bottlenecking is definitely there. It's not terrible though -- every game is still past 30 fps and very playable with the exception of Crysis 1 -- and that's only because I can't handle its frame variance (the actual fps is usually above 30 or somewhere even near 60). But yeah, the 660 SLI setup won't complement that 8320 well, but not so much so that you won't be able to see the gains from a second 660 or anything that bad, and now you have a better opportunity to get a good overclock going, so I recommend you do that to mitigate the bottlenecking by at least a few frames.

iwt · Jul 14, 2014

Deus Gladiorum :

No, that's very unlikely unless you had a PCIe slot that wasn't performing at full capacity or something. Motherboards don't really have any impact on performance. If there is a difference, it's super negligible. However, the advantage of a GA-990FXA-UD3 over your previous motherboard is usually better voltage regulation and so you have a much higher chance of overclocking your FX-8320 to something around 4.5 or 4.6 GHz now. However, prepare to be bottlenecked pretty heavily in certain games with that 660 SLI setup.

I have an FX-6300 @ 4.5 GHz and the bottlenecking is definitely there. It's not terrible though -- every game is still past 30 fps and very playable with the exception of Crysis 1 -- and that's only because I can't handle its frame variance (the actual fps is usually above 30 or somewhere even near 60). But yeah, the 660 SLI setup won't complement that 8320 well, but not so much so that you won't be able to see the gains from a second 660 or anything that bad, and now you have a better opportunity to get a good overclock going, so I recommend you do that to mitigate the bottlenecking by at least a few frames.

Alright, thanks a lot.

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Will I see a difference in performance?

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