I'm wondering what the mood is lately on these two. I suppose they're both good quality but faults can happen so I'm thinking that ease and quality of support may be the primary concern.

I'm looking at a ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3 or a GIGABYTE GA-970A-UD3P AM3 for an office/work computer.

One strike against Gigabyte already is their product page overview tab for every board I've looked at says To enable AM3+ AMD FX-Series CPU support, please update your motherboard with the most current BIOS found in your motherboard’s download section. It says this for all revisions. It doesn't make sense to me. What are revisions for if not for an updated bios. Of course on their BIOS download page they say: Because BIOS flashing is potentially risky, if you do not encounter problems using the current version of BIOS, it is recommended that you not flash the BIOS.They haven't answered my question to the sales dept which is another strike.

Any suggestions for a solid economical machine that will run games just for testing mod work would be appreciated. I have a GTX 570 I'd like to get some use out of.

Thanks

What gets me is always the "how"? If this board doesn't support this CPU until the BIOS is updated, how do I update the BIOS on it to support it? If I have an older CPU the board supports without the update lying around, fine, but what if I bought both new and have nothing else?





The Jedi Master

With those two strikes, why not get ASUS then?

I've always used ASUS and they've always just worked; although it seems some of their cheaper-line stuff is more prone to faulty parts

My first experience with Gigabyte wasn't good
I just helped a friend build a new PC with a Gigabyte mobo, and it had a single bent pin in the socket from the factory. Even after getting the pin back into place, the board wouldn't POST, leaving us wondering if it was the pin or something else QA missed

Have had Gigabyte motherboards in my last 3 builds. Never had an issue or needed to contact them for support.

I've been building two or three AMD powered computers a year.

Normally, I look for the least expensive ASUS or Gigabyte motherboard that day -- that has the features I want.

Virtually all the ASUS and Gigabyte AMD motherboards selling today were made after the last major AMD CPU introduction. Consequently, I've found the BIOSs to be "up to date" -- even though the advertising carries the BIOS warning. Of course, it is not guaranteed someone is not selling "old stock".

There is not much difference between ASUS and Gigabyte AMD motherboards. Both are well designed and well made. ASUS normally supports overclocking a bit better than Gigabyte. Many Gigabyte motherboards have TWO COPIES OF THE BIOS on board -- to rescue you if you have a BIOS install failure -- I like that feature (check the description of the board you are considering for the dual-BIOS feature).

I notice that the Gigabyte you list has the GIGABYTE UEFI DualBIOS™. UEFI is also a useful feature for some builds. Its a modern graphical BIOS that supports some relatively new features -- not supported by "old fashioned" text-based BIOS.

Very good. Thanks a lot for the input.


That's what I was wondering. According to a salesman at the MicroCenter you can put the new bios on a flash stick and bios will see it during the POST and go into some sort of flashing mode before it gets to the cpu test, I guess. "He does it all the time."


During my last build a few years back it seemed the mood here was that Asus was slipping and their support wasn't the best. I had a problem and thought their support was lame myself. So, I went with Gigabyte. I was thinking that maybe Asus had been the de facto top-of-the-line for so long they got cheap and cut support costs and that maybe other companies try harder. Gigabyte was boasting the solid caps which I assume means non-electrolytic which will fail eventually. I guess I'm hoping to find good reason to stay with Gigabyte.


Sorry I don't understand. My mind is stuck thinking of cpu sockets where the pins are soldered to the board and the cpu plugs into the female socket.


That sounds good. You are Lucky.


That's the confirmation I was hoping to see. Thanks for your other comments as well. That and everyone else's input gives me what I was looking for to make a decision.

It's interesting that since I posted this question yesterday, today I got an answer from Gigabyte (after six days) which was basically to consult the cpu support page and ignore the product overview page.

From this and another incident it seems that manufacturers "hawk" certain websites looking for holes in their PR. I would say that's a Kudo for SimHQ and the people here.

Interesting thread, thanks all.

Let's put the opposite question: Is there actually such a thing as a bad motherboard these days? I mean, if you don't want fancy overclocking or need insane bus speeds for some very specific usages...

If it's from a no-name OEM, I'm guessing it's quite possible.

However, with all the big companies, if their products were regularly bad, they wouldn't still be around would they?
Now they may have horrible customer service, because if less than 1% of their customers are calling them, that leaves 99% who never had to deal with it and don't know it's bad. So a company can easily have great products but lousy CS, but I think we would all prefer that to a company with great CS that EVERYONE is using all the time because their stuff has the build quality of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.



The Jedi Master

Asus is what i use on all my clients builds

IMO if you do any gaming, you'll still want one with a feature-rich BIOS, good power management, and reliability. Once you get into the "bargain" price range; you can loose a lot of things that you'll probably want/need later down the road.

Also, some of the cheaper ones are more prone to issues and can bite you in the end (as in the case with my friend's build I mentioned)

But as for tripple SLI, 5+ expansion slots, 2vs.4 DIMM slots, HD audio, etc.; you can better choose what you'll need and reduce the price a little. It just depends on your needs

To be honest this thing here I currently run was a top of the line Asus P55 board five years ago... I think I never even looked into the BIOS.

But yeah, I wouldn't buy no-name or bottom price.