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Best AM3 Gaming Mobo?

Forum Motherboards & Memory : General Motherboard - Best AM3 Gaming Mobo?

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Which of these do you guys think would be the best mobo for mainly gaming:
#1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813128378
#2: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131366
#3: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131383

Please take in account that I will be using a PII 995 BE, and may never use SLi/Crossfire. So which one would be the best?

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The 790GX board would be all you need then.

I have to point out that there is no benefit currently to an AM3 board or DDR3. You can use the CPU with AM2+ and DDR2.

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Reply to Proximon

Proximon wrote :

The 790GX board would be all you need then.

I have to point out that there is no benefit currently to an AM3 board or DDR3. You can use the CPU with AM2+ and DDR2.

So DDR3 isn't any faster? Thank you for telling me that.

Reply to Tooz

No faster according to tests done. The AM3 DDR3 platform might get better in the future, and since the memory controller is on the CPU, that would be the reason to buy the DDR3 board.... does that make sense?
Possibly, AMD will utilize DDR3 better in a future CPU, to be clearer.

My experience is that buying for future upgrades rarely works out. You buy a good system, you are happy with it, and by the time you are no longer happy technology has moved on by a good margin.

Most of our current upgraders are coming from socket 939 or early LGA 775 boards, and find they need to replace everything. That seems to be the trend. Build well, be happy for three or 4 years, build again.

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------------------------------ My Guide to choosing parts
A big list of recommended parts
Troubleshooting Guide w/links
Reply to Proximon

Proximon wrote :

Alright, thanks a lot for the info, I'll probably go for the ASUS board because it has that discount with the processor I want (and in fact I am coming from 939 ), so I appreciate the help, and I'll be fine if there might not be any new processors that utilize DDR3 coming out.

Reply to Tooz

I've been putting together a new system online and was wondering whether it would be better to go AM3 or AM2+. I'll be getting a PII X4, either the 940 or 955, depending on whether or not I go AM3. I would also mostly game/multi-task.

Should I just still with the reliable ddr2 or go ddr3 for future upgrades?

Or could I get a mobo that supports both and just upgrade from ddr2 to ddr3 in the future after I bios flash or something?

Reply to LiteBulb

I've given all my thoughts on it, except:

If you wait a week or so, the price of DDR3 might get so low that it's no longer a problem.

------------------------------ My Guide to choosing parts
A big list of recommended parts
Troubleshooting Guide w/links
Reply to Proximon

some people are hitting speeds of 1800mhz for the ddr3 memory (on 790 chipset motherboards), so if that is important to you then the price won't be a factor. However gaming tests seem to indicate that the X4 940/DDRII1066/AM2+ and X4 955/DDRIII1333/AM3 are currently comparable in the framerate dept.

There are incremental differences in some benchmarks (Sandra, pcvantage) , but real world performance is about the same. I think they are saying that DDR3 will not really futureproof your pc, because eventually there will be a move to DDR4 which may provide more of a boost than moving to DDR3.

DDR3 MIGHT make a difference with 6 core or 8 core processors but we don't really know that yet.

Reply to buzznut

On a lot of the reviews for the 955 they were saying the MSI board was the best at the time, and it has a combo deal also.
The 940 and 920 will be going EOL this year and I would guess a lot of AM2/+ boards will also. To me it looks like AMD is finally going to start the push for DDR3 and start dropping support for DDR2 which could mean that in a year or two to upgrade it may take everything to be replaced if a person goes DDR2 now (which is why I would suggest getting at least a AM3 cpu now).

I stuck with socket 478 for quite a long time (mainly because I need to upgrade most everything instead if just a piece at a time) and when I started to have MB's die on me I found that there were no decent ones available because tech moved on. It has been a while since a person has been able to find a decent 939 board for the same reason, once the change over starts older stuff starts getting scarce and I think that is going to be happening to the AM2/+ stuff very soon now.

That is why I now have a Ci7 now, my last P4 MB died and I had to decide whether to get a budget setup to replace it or get a new main system and use my 8400 for the secondary system. I chose the latter and I am happy with the increase in per clock performance I got (I don't use any programs that use more than 2 threads and didn't need a quad let alone an eight threaded beast) and has shown me a good increase in performance on what I do.

Reply to Ancient_1

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