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Building a new Haswell PC, Need MoBo advice

V

vlatkovr

Junior Member
Hi,

I am planning to buy a new Haswell i5-4690k based PC and I am looking for Motherboard advice.

I am not a gamer, the PC will mostly be used for browsing, development (Eclipse, MS Visual Studio. etc). I am not even buying a dedicated GPU as I plan to use the CPU one. So that part is not too important to me (even if I buy a graphics card in the future it will be a mainstream one, not the SLI /Crossfire or whatever the hardcore gaming stuff are called).

I want a z97 based board as I plan to overclock the CPU (a modest one, 4Ghz or so).

I know you would say that I don't need an overclocked 4690 for my type of work but I am currently working on a 6 year old Core Q8300 and I desperately need an upgarde, plus the board + CPU is not that expensive anyway and I want to get the max speed for that amount of money.

I had a look at some budget Z97 boards and found the following:
1. ASRock Z97 Anniversary
2. Asus Z97-P
3. GigaByte GA-Z97M-DS3H / GigaByte GA-Z97M-D3H / GigaByte GA-Z97-HD3
4. MSI Z97M-G43 / MSI Z97-G43
5. ASRock Z97 Pro3 / ASRock Z97M Pro4

Which one would you recommend? Please feel free to suggest another one in their price range.

Thx
 
The ASUS Z97-Deluxe board has 16-phase-power design.

The ASUS Z97-WS has 10 or 8+2 phase power design. A Sabertooth Z97 is also likely to be 8+2.

If the Z97-Deluxe and the Z97-Pro are identical in this spec, I'd get the Pro board unless the Deluxe had features I'd be willing to pay more for.

If you don't want an ASUS board, then apply the same logic to the board models of the other makers like Gigabyte or AsRock.
 
ASUS or GIGABYTE

ASRock is good too but more budget oriented, never tried MSI motherboards.

I just bought H97M Pro4 and I'm very satisfied with the quality for the price I paid.
 
Thx to all for the suggestions.

At the end I decided to go for the gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H.

Seems to offer everything I need like M.2, high quality audio codec (for this price range), Intel LAN, etc.
 
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