Motherboard recommendation?

[supermaughan]

I haven't done a build in a while and I'm not up to date on the newer technology. My M4A785TD-EVO motherboard died and I need to replace it. I have an Athlon II X4 620 CPU and some 8gig (2x4) DDR3 1600 Ram. I have a Sapphire 4890 Vapor x GPU. I'm looking for a good motherboard replacement. Any recommendations and known good deals would be appreciated.

I don't need the onboard GPU any more but I'm not sure what a good chipset is these days. Are the AMD chipsets still better than the nForce? I do have some legacy hard drives and I will need a IDE connection.

 

[beenthere]

For performance and reliability I recommend Gigabyte mobos based on my 20 years of building PCs and having used all the major mobo brands. If you buy an AM3+ socket mobo it will run your X4 620 and also allow a future update to Bulldozer based CPUs such as Zambezi and others should you desire. AMD's chipset mobos work wonderfully. The link below is a good choice for a simple, single Vid card PC.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128510

 

[supermaughan]

Thanks for the recommendation. I had already looked at that mobo and it looks good. However I didn't see any IDE connector on it. I guess I can move on from my old hard drives but they still work.

I was wondering what the advantages of the 990 over the 890 or 790 or 785?

 

[beenthere]

No IDE on the newer 990 chipset mobos AFAIK. Everyone is switching to SATA drives, SSDs or using USB flash drives for portability.

The 9xx series chipset allows Bulldozer chips to run RAM at 1866 Mhz. They also allow use of both Crossfire and SLI. The 9xx series has faster internal data processing also. The link below shows the chip specifics including how many x16 PXI-E slots are supported.

http://www.nordichardware.com/news/69-cpu-chipset/42174-amd-bulldozer-series-9-chipset-detailed.html

 

[jsc]

If you need IDE connections with the new motherboards, you will need an IDE expansion card.

 

[supermaughan]

So how does this one compare to the one you recommended?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128521

It is the 970 instead of the 990fx but what advantage is there to the 990fx? I really don't see myself doing crossfire or sli any time soon.