If you are looking for a great bang for your buck, I highly recommend this board. I recently "refreshed" my computer because of a motherboard failure (Gigabyte.. you let me down). I popped in an FX-8320 and 8 GB of Corsair Vengeance ram. Here is the link to the ram I used that works flawlessly with the board: (
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) 240-Pin DDR3 Memory Kit for Core i3, i5, i7 and Platforms SDRAM CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9
Just manually change Bios settings to "1600 MHz" and it automatically does the rest without worrying.
I was worried about the board not booting because of the new FX-8320 processor. My bios was the older one that did not "support" the newer processor. However, the board booted and recognized the CPU on the first try. Not wanting to tempt fate, I loaded the newest bios drivers from Asus onto a USB flash drive and flashed the bios. The bios is very easy to navigate and you can use a mouse in it. The bios flash was painless and I was off and running. I loaded Win 7 onto it, and since I had previously had Win 7 on my Intel 330 SSD I tried to install it after formatting it through the Win 7 installation processor. Win 7 kept giving me an EFI error (something about my HD being formatted improperly for EFI). I almost decided to throw the CPU away at that point, but a quick look at the Bios settings, I turned off "Secure Boot" (I believe this is a Win 8 mandatory thing). After turning off Secure Boot everything went flawlessly. The only funny thing was Win 7 didn't automatically install drivers for the onboard NIC and I had to install the drivers which is the first time in many builds that has ever happened to me.
Using this board for about 2 weeks now I cannot say enough good things about it. Absolutely rock solid, no issues or hangups. Motherboard runs cold for me and has enough goodies that I am impressed. I'd used Gigabyte for a few builds and after it failed I decided to change up to Asus. I'm very pleased with this board and if it holds up I'll always purchase Asus boards from now on.
Side note, on my USB Logitech G35's I was plagued with the awful popping when playing music and was pulling my hair out trying to stop it on my previous Gigabyte board (I think it was a 770 version). I tried everything and just decided to get used to it. With this new board there is absolutely no popping whatsoever so a nice surprise there!
Full specs:
FX-8320
M5A97 R2.0 AM3+ board
8 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 DDR3
Corsair TX-650
Sapphire Vapor-X HD-5770 (Just ordered a Sapphire HD-7870, so hopefully it works just as good!)
Intel 330 SSD 128 GB
Toshiba DVD burner
3 Western Digital 500 GB HDs
**UPDATE 12/2/2013**
This motherboard has been absolutely great for me and I've been very pleased with it. I upgraded my CPU cooler from the Coolermaster Hyper 212+ to the Corsair H80 and worked around my cooling situation in my Antec 300 case with some great new fans including an Antec Spot fan directly onto my socket/VRM area. I've sort of reached a point where I can no longer increase my overclock because the motherboard(and my CPU) aren't allowing me to go any higher. Even with great thermals, I worry a little pushing this board really hard. Don't let that discourage you though, this is arguably one of the best "budget" motherboard's I've ever had.
Since I've had a difficult time finding settings that work for OC'ing on this motherboard, I'll lay a few out to give anyone who is interested a starting point. I've seen people say this board will crash, burn, and melt when OC'ing so I'll sort of dispel that here.
**(Obviously, overclocking your computer is at your own risk. You void warranties and risk damaging components by doing this! Please don't emulate me unless you are truly okay with any kinds of negative or positive consequences that may come about) **
My settings for a decent overclock:
Ai overclock tuner: Manual
CPU Ratio: 22.0
AMD turbo core: disabled
CPU bus frequency: auto
Memory frequency: 1600
CPU/NB frequency: 2200
HT: 2400
PCIE spread and CPU spread spectrum both disabled
CPU LLC: Enabled
Northbridge/cpu LLC: Auto
Adjust CPU voltage manually
CPU voltage: 1.4125
Everything else set to auto. All C6/HPC/APM disabled.
A manual CPU voltage of 1.4125 with LLC enabled on this board will shoot your voltage up around 1.44 or so under load with this board so be aware of the thermal commitment/power usage of that. Also, I chose to cool my VRM/socket area with the Antec Spot Cool just to be on the safe side messing with the voltages.
Also, Cool & Quiet cannot be enabled when you manually adjust CPU voltages on this board (I don't really understand why). Thus, your CPU will run at full voltage regardless of load. Using my H80 the socket temperature is around 35C completely idle. Under full bore load (OCCT), I'm running about 60 C on my CPU socket and 47C on my cores. A better quality board would keep the CPU socket temperature closer to the cores, but you will pay double the price for that. The thermal limits on the FX-8320/83250 is 62C on the cores and 72C on the CPU socket. All the processors that you buy are subject to the "silicone lottery" which means some will be great overclockers and some will be terrible. These are my settings for 4.4GHz on 8 cores running stable, so yes you can OC this board and it is pretty decent at it. If you want to push your chip any harder you're probably looking at the wrong board (I would steer you towards the Asus Crosshair Formula or Asus Sabertooth motherboards)
| RAM | 32 GB DDR3 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 1333 MHz |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 6 |
