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Dirth of enthusiast level FM2+ motherbards

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Thanks for the input, guys. Switching gears a little here but I wound up getting the MSI A78M-E35 V2, a $60 mATX from Amazon. I didn't want to put a lot of bucks into this project and I had read a review where they used the v.1 for a budget overclock experiment with an 860k CPU. Actually, I was pretty surprised as to how this little board held up to the overclock. Took it to 4.3 ghz on 1.52 vcore and with AMDOD I could get it stable at 4.4 on 1.55 vcore. AMDOD was the only way I could get the vcore to go that high as there was no manual adjustment in the bios for core voltage. It was increased automatically as you raised the core speed ratio but it became deficient beyond 4.3 ghz. I thought this was an odd omission in a bios so I calle MSI to confirm and I was correct. Auto vcore only. So I'm returning the board to Amazon. But the mosfets and chokes did not seem to get dangerously hot at 1.55 vcore.

But here was the most amazing thing: I actually got to talk to a live tech person on the phone at MSI. Can you believe it? I was really impressed by that. And he spoke good English too.
 
All boards can make 4.5GHz without problems. What I meant in my last post is when you pass ~5GHz then most boards have huge problems to OC or keep stable voltages or something else. It's nearly impossible to find good quality enthusiast FM2+ board.
I can't say that any of the boards I saw are high end. All FM2+ boards are on cheaper components or have problems with BIOS or something else. Even if you hold these boards then you feel that PCB is thin ( even in top models like ASRock A88 Extreme6 ).

On the other hand even 4 power phases should be more than enough for 5.5GHz+. Some years ago P4/P-D boards had 3-4 power phases and you could push CPUs to 2V+. Somehow I can't believe you can damage power section overclocking APU on even cheap boards. Problem can be only with design quality and BIOS.
Actually Gigabyte boards look good but problems were with BIOS and some ratios. Maybe they fixed it , maybe not. I had no FM2+ board for nearly a year but there not many new boards on the market.
Since FM2+ is cheap series then manufacturers don't care to put additional money into support and BIOS improvements. You can see that most boards have 1-2 BIOS releases.

ITX boards look interesting but price is high. About $100-150 for all of them while mATX cost $50 and are only ~40mm wider.
 
Woomack said:
All boards can make 4.5GHz without problems. What I meant in my last post is when you pass ~5GHz then most boards have huge problems to OC or keep stable voltages or something else. It's nearly impossible to find good quality enthusiast FM2+ board.
I can't say that any of the boards I saw are high end. All FM2+ boards are on cheaper components or have problems with BIOS or something else. Even if you hold these boards then you feel that PCB is thin ( even in top models like ASRock A88 Extreme6 ).

On the other hand even 4 power phases should be more than enough for 5.5GHz+. Some years ago P4/P-D boards had 3-4 power phases and you could push CPUs to 2V+. Somehow I can't believe you can damage power section overclocking APU on even cheap boards. Problem can be only with design quality and BIOS.
Actually Gigabyte boards look good but problems were with BIOS and some ratios. Maybe they fixed it , maybe not. I had no FM2+ board for nearly a year but there not many new boards on the market.
Since FM2+ is cheap series then manufacturers don't care to put additional money into support and BIOS improvements. You can see that most boards have 1-2 BIOS releases.

ITX boards look interesting but price is high. About $100-150 for all of them while mATX cost $50 and are only ~40mm wider.
Click to expand...

This! Very few new editions in the FM2+ camp. MSI seems to be pushing some new ones now.
 
Sure but I just am not ready for MSI anything. Their later video cards seem to have somewhat unlocked core voltage which I like the idea of...but MSI? Just cannot get my head nor heart around it. Maybe just and ole faht.

RGone...
 
I had enough of MSI after seeing many cheaper boards with faulty components or broken traces. They also make bad BIOSes and don't care about cheaper products. Even X99 boards had BIOS problems for like 5 months after release and random BIOS chip death after too high bclk OC.
MSI graphics cards are not convincing me lately because of louder coil whine in most their series comparing to competition, warranty stickers on everything including Lightnings and poor support. Lightnings are also nothing special regarding GPU binning. Their local PR are also total joke. That's about all :)
For me on motherboard market left ASRock, ASUS and Gigabyte. On gfx card market ASUS, EVGA and Gigabyte ... maybe also Galax but I had no chance to test their new cards ( simply not available in local stores ).
 
I've only had 1 MSI motherboard, 780GD 70 I think it was ran my 1090t on it for about 2 years till out of the blue it died, nothing since then on the AMD side has impressed me enough to buy or even contemplate. I can tell you straight up that mATX board was able to OC my 7850 to 4.7 on some pretty high VCORE not stable mind you and way to hot / high VCORE for anything 24/7 but did an ok job.
 
Woomack said:
All boards can make 4.5GHz without problems. What I meant in my last post is when you pass ~5GHz then most boards have huge problems to OC or keep stable voltages or something else. It's nearly impossible to find good quality enthusiast FM2+ board.
I can't say that any of the boards I saw are high end. All FM2+ boards are on cheaper components or have problems with BIOS or something else. Even if you hold these boards then you feel that PCB is thin ( even in top models like ASRock A88 Extreme6 ).

On the other hand even 4 power phases should be more than enough for 5.5GHz+. Some years ago P4/P-D boards had 3-4 power phases and you could push CPUs to 2V+. Somehow I can't believe you can damage power section overclocking APU on even cheap boards. Problem can be only with design quality and BIOS.
Actually Gigabyte boards look good but problems were with BIOS and some ratios. Maybe they fixed it , maybe not. I had no FM2+ board for nearly a year but there not many new boards on the market.
Since FM2+ is cheap series then manufacturers don't care to put additional money into support and BIOS improvements. You can see that most boards have 1-2 BIOS releases.

ITX boards look interesting but price is high. About $100-150 for all of them while mATX cost $50 and are only ~40mm wider.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't call any ASRock board a "top model" whether it be AM3+ or FM2+. ASRock cuts corners its apparent in the postings in this forum. The Crossblade Ranger and the A88X-PRO are top flight boards. Way better than most AM3+ boards by far. They do what they are intended to do. The same can't be said for many ASRock, MSI or Gigabyte AM3+ boards that throttle, burn up or have a BIOS made by nincompoops.
 
C_J61, I mostly agree that the Ranger and for me the Asus A88X-Pro (almost bought) would have been my very first choice, but the board here, FM2A88X Extreme6+, with 8 + 2 VRM would woo me pretty greatly unless users just had shett for trouble.

RGone...
 
chrisjames61 said:
I wouldn't call any ASRock board a "top model" whether it be AM3+ or FM2+. ASRock cuts corners its apparent in the postings in this forum. The Crossblade Ranger and the A88X-PRO are top flight boards. Way better than most AM3+ boards by far. They do what they are intended to do. The same can't be said for many ASRock, MSI or Gigabyte AM3+ boards that throttle, burn up or have a BIOS made by nincompoops.
Click to expand...

ASRock Extreme 6+ was the only board which was used for a long time for extreme overclocking. The main reason is that this board was overclocking higher, had much better power section than any other board and had functional BIOS. It also had no voltage limits like most other boards.
Right now there is maybe a new ASUS but this is already old platform and barely anyone cares about it, especially in so high price.
ASUS doesn't care about AM3+/FM2+ and they drop BIOS support for their AMD boards in 2-3 months ( later there are only meaningless updates like "improves stability" what barely ever is true ).

I'm not saying that ASRock has really great FM2+ boards as even their top model had problems caused by cost cuts but at least they release boards above the average while MSI or Gigabyte are below the average if you are thinking about overclocking on AMD.

I haven't seen ASRock boards throttling or burning. I've seen it on MSI or Gigabyte. ASRock in most cases has higher quality boards than ASUS or any other manufacturer and they actually care to fix any BIOS issues quick or provide any other way of support fast .. not in 3-4 weeks like ASUS or MSI ( I'm waiting for 5 weeks for ASUS board which is in RMA ).
 
The MSI board I spoke of in my original post is now on its way back to Amazon and the 860k was sold on ebay last night. Wasn't impressed particularly with either. I'm done with this thread. I'm sticking with my G5328 until AMD gets their act together.
 
Trents was it the Auto vCore that turned you away or was there something else that killed the deal for you?
 
Auto vcore mostly. Seems like if there are any overclocking controls at all included in a bios, manual vcore adjustment should be one of them. Auto vcore scaled well with frequency insofar as stability was concerned up to 4.3 but didn't keep up beyond that. Mosfets and chokes didn't seem all that hot to the touch at that point so I don't think more vcore would have endangered the board.
 
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