madmatt30 :
the pro 3 will work but its crap quality - I woudl honestly recommend a different board to that one.
I have the ASRock 970M Pro3, just upgraded the Athlon II x4 630 (which had a WEI of 7.2 on Windows 7) to the FX-6300 & it rocks! The 630 couldn't use my 1600MHz dual channel RAM, yet the FX-6300 does just fine. However, many of us knows that the 630 was a 1st gen quad core release from AMD consumers, for the year 2009, an amazing chip to be running over 7.0 on the WEI scale when Windows 7 was new.
Have ran this rebuild for hours on end, kind of hard to call this 'crap quality'. Not a single BSOD, and upgraded to 10 Pro w/out issues & later reinstalled clean, after setting all drives to GPT & using the one click option for UEFI defaults, booted straight into my install media created with Rufus, using the UEFI with GPT partitioning. Though honestly, the only thing I needed the ASRock 970M Pro3 mATX MB for was AHCI, required for proper SSD operation & modern SATA-3. The rest of the features that came with it, including one click UEFI Mode & other features such as the TPM header, which will be my next upgrade, a sweet deal for $54.99 plus get $15 back as a rebate that will likely be forgotten about when arrives, still one would never get a 1150 Z97 MB (or most any 1150 MB) with all of these features for that price.
Yes, sometimes manufacturing defects arises, but in this day & time, having an AM3+ MB built in 2015, is a huge plus. Many of the other offerings were dated 'new stock', and in the year 2011, when the Gigabyte MB I replaced was built, should had shipped with both AHCI & SATA-3 ports.
I applaud ASRock for standing in there, providing some level of innovation for AM3+ customers, which will no longer be pushed once AMD releases it's next line of DDR4 ready APU's, most of the FX series will be heavily discounted to purge stock. Yet I'd bet that ASRock will continue to push at least a couple of MB's for the line.
Bottom line is in the year 2016, the ASRock 970 Pro3 is the only choice for those who wants a modern MB & all SATA-3 ports who have late Athlon & FX series CPU's. A couple competitors has MB's with 4 SATA-2 & 2 SATA-3 ports, though many consumers complained booting from the SATA-3 ports weren't the best experience. Good for storage only.
BTW, here's the build, has been running for a few hours. It's amazing how these 'hot' chips often runs below 30C, and one time, came to 19C before I could get a snapshot.
http://speccy.piriform.com/results/h0SIFsexB0FrtWsvFV7aTfS
For those with mATX cases, this MB is the best choice one can make, if running an AM3/AM3+ chip, I searched for days & asked lots of questions before settling on the ASRock 970M Pro3.
Cat
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