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Suggestions on choosing MB

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Rigit

Member
Joined
Oct 2, 2010
Once again Gigabyte has failed me and I find myself needing a new board. That make's 2 in 2 years. So I'm looking for a board. Obviously Gigajunk is off the table. I need to be budget conscious as possible while still meeting my needs. My cpu is in my sig. Essentially am3 or am3+. (I've found far more am3+ boards than plain am3) Also all I've got for memory right now is DDR3 1066 and I've found a lot of boards won't support that now. I plan to overclock so it must meet those needs and I need on board video. USB 3.0 would be nice as well as HDMI. At some point in the not to far future I intend to go to an x6 cpu.I found a board here:
http://www.magicmicro.com/pmoreinfo.asp?iid=3676
Seems to meet my needs but reviews for the site are mixed with almost all negative ratings involving pre-assembled boxes. I just need a board. That's about it I strongly need and appreciate the help guys.
 
TRUE and accurate AM3+ boards will NOT have onboard video since it is not in the spec for AM3+ and AMD is selling APU boards for that spec'd slot.

So that is going to leave you with very decent AM3 boards with Video since those chipsets went out of production some years ago. At least 2 years.
RGone...
 
Just wondering, what happened to the other one? Why won't you RMA it?

It stopped recognizing my hard drive. It's not the drive I've tried 2 other known good drives with the same results. I can trick it into going to windows by hot plugging most of the time, but it's not much good because windows will get corrupted rather quickly and eventually fail to boot. I guess I could try and RMA it, but that would take weeks. First I ship it at MY expense and then they look at it and determine what's wrong or tell me they can't find a problem and send the the same board back and I got nowhere. In a nutshell I guess I'm just fed up with Gigabyte. They can send me a brand new board and I'll get it all set up with all of my stuff back and then crash and burn. I'll consider that if need be but at the same time I'd also like to go with a known reliable company like Asus. I can go higher in price then the board I listed in my original post. So again I'm asking for suggestions.
 
Yeah, you'll want to go with AM3+. No reason not too, either from a technology standpoint since they are backwards compatible with AM3 CPUs or from a cost standpoint. Look at the Asus M5A97 evo R.2 or the Asus M5A99x evo R.2 which are very good boards and around the $100-$125 range USD. Either one would be appropriate for your CPU. The first one has 4+2 power phase and the latter has 6+2 power phase. Both would overclock your CPU well with good cooling. Neither have video onboard so you would need to pick up a cheap video card if you had been relying on the onboard video before.
 
Further testing has proven my initial thoughts dead wrong. I'm still not quite understanding the whole thing but the short of it is if i put that hard drive in another computer the same thing happens. The computer will not even post. I'm confused because the Gigabyte board did it with known good drives. I'm thinking, hoping, that it was because of the cmos not being cleared properly before testing the other drives. I was certain I had but now with this latest development maybe not. This 2TB Seagate was just bought last July. I knew I should have stuck with WD. I've never had a WD drive fail. This makes 2 Seagates. Thing here is my entire DVD collection was digitized and stored on that drive. Thankfully by hot plugging the thing after post I got windows to see it and run a check disk. It managed to recover the data and I'm getting it all off right now. There's only about 700GB on it and I might just have enough space in hard drives to store it until my new 2TB arrives. This drive is a low power drive made for mass storage only. I was going to use it to back all of this up. Damn thing failed before it got here. I'll have to RMA the Seagate.
 
What did the Windows Check disc turn up? Did it find a bad boot sector? I guess I'm wondering how, if the HD is bad, why were you able to read it and recover your files? I think I would try a low level reformat and then a re-install of Windows.

Have you checked your ram with Memtest86+? Bad ram can corrupt OS files.
 
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