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In need of motherboard advice

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BigMak911

New Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2010
Hey guys, team huddle time ...need some advice. Here's what's in the build I'm currently working on:

Phenom II x4 965 BE 125W C3 (hoping to get a 4GHz OC)
2x Powercolor Radeon HD5770 1GB 875MHz
8GB DDR3-1600 OCZ Black Edition RAM
Xigmatek Dark Knigt Cooler
Scythe Ultra-Kaze exhaust fan
22x DVD-RW from LG (I've heard all the raging against bluebirds, but I'll update the firmware immediately and it was cheeeeeeeeeeeeap)
Enermax 720W SLI/Xfire PSU
Rosewill multicard reader
Dlink b/g/n card
2xUSB/2x1394 PCI card with an azio bluetooth dongle on an internal port

So here's the question:
Between the Biostar TA790GX A3+ and the ECS A790GXM-AD3 Black series motherboards, which should I go with and why? (Note, I aleady have both of those motherboards as each came separately with a package deal on something else I bought, so ideally it'll be one of these two, but if both are REALLY bad, and you guys have advice on how I can sell them pretty quick to afford a different mobo, I'd consider that too).
 
I'm not a real fan of ECS, especially for overclocking. Sometimes their bioses are really lacking in overclocking features even when the necessary hardware is in place. Biostar makes some good boards but some bad ones too. Do your research.
 
How well have your Biostar Mobos overclocked compared to others you've used?
 
How well have your Biostar Mobos overclocked compared to others you've used?

One was a build for a friend, The other for my wife, Both have been running with modest overclocks for approx a year now. I did not try pushig either of them hard when built. They both had plenty of O.C.ing options and pretty good NB cooling.
 
I've only used one Biostar board and one ECS board.
The Biostar was a 790gx chipset, it had plenty of overclocking options but they were laid out very strangely, and it doesn't recalculate ram/ht/CPUNB speeds as you change the bus speed like Asus boards do. Worked fine though, got a decent OC out of it.

The ECS board i used (use, really) is a bargain basement G31 chipset, considering that it has basic memory options (667 or 800 speed, and the four main SPD options) and FSB as the entirety of the overclocking options, it does really well.
I got a 3ghz P4 to 4ghz, my e5200 padmodded for more vcore is running at 3450 right now, and my e1200 padmodded for 333fsb and more vcore ran at 2.66 for a few months.
The southbridge cooling sucks though.

Never used an AMD ECS board.
 
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