Motherboard Gaming Comparison

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TheMiG

Reputable
May 20, 2015
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Which is better?
- ASRock Fatal1ty H97 Peformance Intel LGA 1150 ATX

OR

- MSI B85-G43 GAMING LGA 1150

Getting parts to build a gaming pc and don't know which one to get. Both around the same price. *I don't really know much about motherboards sorry*

Cheers.
 
Solution
timeconsumer
Here's the differences (use H87 for H97 in the chart)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1150

Mostly there's no difference between B85 and H97 for gamers. There's a lot of features you probably aren't using.

The most significant difference is Haswell Refresh Processors like i3 4160, i5 4460/4590/4690, i7 4790 and a few others. There's no guarantee a B85 board will have the BIOS to support these out of the box and may require a BIOS flash (which requires a different processor, got one lying around?)
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timeconsumer

timeconsumer

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Nov 28, 2011
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Here's the differences (use H87 for H97 in the chart)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1150

Mostly there's no difference between B85 and H97 for gamers. There's a lot of features you probably aren't using.

The most significant difference is Haswell Refresh Processors like i3 4160, i5 4460/4590/4690, i7 4790 and a few others. There's no guarantee a B85 board will have the BIOS to support these out of the box and may require a BIOS flash (which requires a different processor, got one lying around?)
 
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Solution
T

TheMiG

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May 20, 2015
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So your saying the MSI wouldn't support an i5 4690?
 
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timeconsumer

timeconsumer

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Nov 28, 2011
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It may, it may not. It depends on which BIOS it gets shipped with. If it gets shipped with the newest one, you're fine. But if it doesn't, you can't boot. And the only way to fix it is to find an older 1150 processor to do a BIOS flash.

You can use the B85 with older Haswell CPUs like the 4440 or 4670 without issue though.
 
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Onus

Onus

Titan
Jan 27, 2006
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The H97 is, IMO, a much more robust chipset. It gives you additional ports, and can run RAID configurations. Speed-wise, there will not be any difference between the two. Note the potential issue with new CPUs on B85. Likely a non-issue, "likely" <> "certainly," so be aware of it.
If these boards are the same price though, I'd never choose B85 over H97 myself. ASRock uses high quality capacitors and ferrite core chokes on all of their boards.
 
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synphul

synphul

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Mar 11, 2011
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I'd opt for the asrock as well. Likely better quality, more updated chipset etc. In terms of motherboards, they really have little to do with gaming. Slapping 'gaming' in the title is like selling a 'racing' cupholder for your car. If anything gaming boards in general 'might' indicate that it's sli/crossfire capable though h97 doesn't support sli so that proves that theory right off the bat. Anything else 'gaming' could indicate it uses the qualcomm killer e2200 lan chip which is supposed to provide better throughput for gaming across the network connection (gaming network priority) typically provided by their software. Most people realize very little difference and some people prefer plain old intel lan chips for stability/reliability without noticing any loss of performance.
 
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