990fx motherboard decision

[Kalessian]

For reasons unexplainable I find myself wanting a new 990FX board for an FX6300 setup. I'm looking at ~$130.

Right now on newegg, there's the ASRock Extreme4 ($130), the ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0($130 AR), and the Gigabyte UD3($140 AR).

Heavily leaning toward the ASRock
+ Phase 8+2 (gigabyte 8+2, asus 6+2)
+ No rebate
+ Broadcom gigabit vs realtek for others
- 2 year warranty vs 3 for the others

Only benefit of the ASUS seems to be the PCI-e layout/lane-age but I won't ever use beyond 2x SLI. The gigabyte is sort of the same just more money.

Any reason to not get this particular ASRock beyond the 2 year warranty?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I own the ASRock 990FX Extreme4 board, and it works well. However, it has issues with AHCI hotplug. It seems that there is none. I have it in a Rosewill Blackhawk case, which has a SATA HD dock on top. With my older P35 mobo with Intel ICH9R SATA controller in AHCI mode, in Windows 7, HDDs plugged into the dock, show up under Safely Remove Hardware. They do not with the ASrock board. I think it's a BIOS issue, actually, as newer Intel mobos (1155) have a BIOS option for each SATA port, whether to enable hotswap on that port or not. The Extreme4 lacks that option.

You can work around this using the 3rd-party tool "Hotswap!".

 

[Kalessian]

Well I went with the ASRock, my first one ever, hopefully it goes well. I see a lot of threads with small quirks like the one you mentioned but none of them are deal breakers, hopefully bios updates will fix them.

 

[guskline]

I snagged a Gigabyte UD3 when they had that brief super discount for @$104. Very solid mb that I run with a FX8150 and a Gigabyte 7870OC.