I recently bought a modest M51BC refurbished for $189 since that price is way better than what I was going to spend on a similar build. The motherboard says M51BC in CPU-Z and SpeedFan, but the sticker on the motherboard says M5A97 EVO2 which was incidentally the mobo I was about to buy anyway. Is there a difference? How do I know which it actually is? Should I add a pic of it? If they aren't the same thing, I don't even want to speculate, just at a loss to understand which twilight zone episode I'm in. I immediately added my old HDD, RAM, PSU, GPU and CPU cooler and some extra fans. Turned out to be a decent build for under $300 if you include what I added and I'm not even annoyed that it's windows 8.1.....yet.
FX-6300 + Hyper T2 cooler
?mobo?
1x8GB + 2x4GB RAM
2 X 500GB 7200RPM HDD
EVGA 450BT PSU
GT 710 2GD3LP fan cooled (I know, don't laugh, it runs astroneer over 30 FPS with a 2nd monitor active and that's enough for me, for now)
One day, I may find some better RAM and want to overclock over 4GHz for reasons that don't exist today, so I'd like to have a little confidence in my hardware. Of course, I don't plan on dropping more money on this build for anything that won't be useful in a future Ryzen build or something. The current system seems to handle 4.0GHz@1.4V for about 30 minutes stressed before it goes over 52C and I'm not going past 52C with a $10 cooler and a $30 PSU on an unidentified mobo. It's not like any games I successfully run through a GT 710 NEED more than 4GHz on CPU anyway, and it's nice to finally be able to play JustCause3 after living in A6-5200 land with 8GB RAM for way too long. My biggest issue aside from ?mobo? is why my GT 710 gets hotter in this build than the old one, but I just imagine its because everything else in the new sys is generating more heat. Thanks in advance for any help, love me some Tom's forums!
FX-6300 + Hyper T2 cooler
?mobo?
1x8GB + 2x4GB RAM
2 X 500GB 7200RPM HDD
EVGA 450BT PSU
GT 710 2GD3LP fan cooled (I know, don't laugh, it runs astroneer over 30 FPS with a 2nd monitor active and that's enough for me, for now)
One day, I may find some better RAM and want to overclock over 4GHz for reasons that don't exist today, so I'd like to have a little confidence in my hardware. Of course, I don't plan on dropping more money on this build for anything that won't be useful in a future Ryzen build or something. The current system seems to handle 4.0GHz@1.4V for about 30 minutes stressed before it goes over 52C and I'm not going past 52C with a $10 cooler and a $30 PSU on an unidentified mobo. It's not like any games I successfully run through a GT 710 NEED more than 4GHz on CPU anyway, and it's nice to finally be able to play JustCause3 after living in A6-5200 land with 8GB RAM for way too long. My biggest issue aside from ?mobo? is why my GT 710 gets hotter in this build than the old one, but I just imagine its because everything else in the new sys is generating more heat. Thanks in advance for any help, love me some Tom's forums!
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