What AM3+ motherboard should i consider for upgrade

[deejayburnout]

Evening peeps

I am looking upgrade my motherboard as I am not getting the full potential out of my system.

As you can see from my details at the side, my present board is an AM2+ board and I have a AM3 capable chip.

Also my Gpu is a PCI 3 card and my board is PCI 2.Also running DDR2 Ram.

I would like a board that can unlock the potential of my CPU and GPU as well as allowing for higher overclock as I am not pushing my CPU any higher as my present board doesn't have good VRM cooling.
I presume that most new boards come with SATA 6GBs as well, so that would be an added bonus. Having DDR3 ram would allow me to run faster speed ram.

I have also read somewhere that the 990fx chipset is better as well.

What boards should I consider?

Price is not an major issue as I will save up for the appropriate board. I am looking for something that meets my needs but may allow me to upgrade to a newer AMD chip in the future.

I don't even know where to start, hence why I am asking for advice. name such as Asus Sabretooth spring to mind but what are alternatives

Thanks

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

TBH,I don't think you can get massively higher on a Phenom II X4.

Only socket FM2+ has PCI-E 3.0 ATM on AMD platforms.

If you don't need dual cards I would get this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/M5A97-EVO-R2.../dp/B008RPZ5H8

The Sabretooth is a great motherboard,and generally one of the better motherboards for eking out the last MHZ from on overclock on a FX CPU.

[scaryjim]

... I am looking for something that meets my needs but may allow me to upgrade to a newer AMD chip in the future. ....

There's unlikely to be any new AMD CPUs for socket AM3+, so presumably you're thinking of an FX-6300/8320/8350 second hand at some point? I personally wouldn't be looking at AM3+ as a long term upgrade plan - it's rather long in the tooth now. 890FX, released over 4 years ago, was a fairly minor update to 790FX, and 990FX was an even smaller upgrade over 890FX again. Ultimately the platform hasn't changed much in close on seven years. Several companies have shown consumer DDR4 at Computex this year, and Intel will be supporting it in Haswell-E, so it looks a lot like DDR4 will be hitting mainstream in the next year or so. When that happens AMD are likely to dump AM3+ and move wholesale to DDR4-supporting platforms (possibly even a unified platform for APUs and performance CPUs), so it seems reasonable to assume that AM3+'s days are numbered.

As CAT's already said, there aren't any PCIe 3.0 AM3+ boards, but tbh even the highest end graphics cards don't gain much moving between 2.0 and 3.0; maybe 1-2% at most. If you're already on an SSD then SATA 3 isn't going to make any noticable real world difference; sequential read/write isn't the big bottleneck, random access times are, and you don't get a huge improvement moving between SATA 2 and SATA 3. And Phenom processors have always responded better to tight latencies rather than high bandwidth, so moving to DDR3 is unlikely to give you any noticable real world performance benefit either.

So ultimately - given you've already got 8GB of RAM, an SSD, and a mid-range GPU, I don't see any real benefit to buying into a platform that's probably within a year of end-of-life. If you genueinly want to look to the future, the best bet is to stick with what you have for now and start saving towards a new system some time in the next year, once everyone's plans for DDR4-based platforms become clear.

[deejayburnout]

Thanks for the advice. I thought that AMD dumped the FM platform for AM3+.

Probably best to wait as you say for the new gen of ddr4. What platform is AMD using for there future CPU?

[HalloweenJack]

aye the best yu can really get as a 990FX AM3+ board which supports usb3 , sata 3 and FX 8xxx and 9xxx cpu`s - BUT its 3 years old now and AMD binned the 1090FX chipset a while back


although I do like my Asus Sabertooth 990FX and AMD 9590 - am thinking about downgrading as I don't use it huge amounts now

[scaryjim]

.... What platform is AMD using for there future CPU?

No idea. None of the leaked or official AMD roadmaps have CPUs have the current generation of Piledriver-based FX chips. There's speculation that they simply won't make any more enthusiast CPUs; that they might repurpose Opteron silicon (although AFAIK the Opterons are still Piledriver-based, like the FX chips); that they'll make enthusiast APUs with smaller GPUs and more CPU modules and cache; but AMD are remaining suspiciously silent.

The FM platform is newer than the AM3+ platform and is marginally better equipped: FM2+ support PCIe 3 if you're using a Kaveri APU, and it has native SATA3, USB3, etc. There's a certain amount of speculation - and I have to admit it's my favoured school of thought - that the next iteration (presumably FM3) will be a DDR4 platform under which AMD will reunite their enthusiast and mainstream platforms, producing at the very least some enthusiast APUs with 6 or 8 cores and a lump of L3 cache.

But any and all of those ideas are just speculation, because AMD have said nothing about their future consumer CPU plans. And that's why I'd be very cautious about looking at an AMD platform as a long-term investment, right now...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It depends,I will recommend a FX6300 or FX8320 for a number of gaming,just on the merits of the CPU,and the price of the platform overall.

[crossy]

aye the best yu can really get as a 990FX AM3+ board which supports usb3 , sata 3 and FX 8xxx and 9xxx cpu`s - BUT its 3 years old now and AMD binned the 1090FX chipset a while back

although I do like my Asus Sabertooth 990FX and AMD 9590 - am thinking about downgrading as I don't use it huge amounts now

I'll second (or is it third?) the recommendation of the Sabretooth 990FX. Thanks to Cat's advice I upgraded from an old M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 (890GX chipset) and the performance gain is pretty startling. E.g. as standard I'm running at a couple of MHz below 4GHz and that's running cool and stable (or at least as stable as Windows ever is!). If I wanted to push it I reckon 4.1GHz easy - and that's on air cooling. And last time I looked there were a couple of good deals going on the FX's.