looking for a fm2 motherboard

ajs_fla

Member
Dec 16, 1999
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Planning on building a couple of trinity based systems and am looking at the various chipsets available.

First I have ruled out the 55 chipset as I want sata 6 and usb3.0. So it is down to a 75 or 85 based board. I plan on 16gb of memory and would like to know if any of the boards available allow you to allocate more than 512 mb of ram for video, that will probably be the main factorin my decision. I am looking at 2133 ram for the boards. Second is there any real performance increase by using the 85(x) chipset versus the 75? I would really prefer to stay below a 100.00 (newegg price ) for my motherboard. I really don't need 8 sata 6 but do want native sata6 for a ssd etc.

Thanks in advance for all comments.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
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If you're trying to stretch your money as best you can don't bother with the A85, it's not worth the premium over the A75.

I recently upgraded my HTPC and went with the following components. Maybe this will help you. I'm in Canada so adjust prices accordingly.

Motherboard: MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 ($58 and free shipping)
CPU: A10-5800K $124 with free shipping.
Heatsink: Re-purposed over Noctual CP12-SE14
Powesupply: Corsair CX430 V2 ($20 after rebate)
8GB Samsung DDR3 1600 (MV-3V4G3D/US, $39 bucks)
160GB Intel G2 SSD (left over from a few years ago but still pretty fast today)
Silverstone Grandia GD05 (left over from previous build, excellent case)


This combination allows me to run at 4.3 Ghz CPU, 1013 GPU and 2133 Memory at comfortable temperatures and voltages. Don't let the RAM speed fool you, this Samsung RAM can easily hit 2133 at 1.45 volts and they're low profile which is great for airflow and heatsink clearance issues. This MSI motherboard allows you to allocate up to 2GB of video memory.

Good luck!
 

ajs_fla

Member
Dec 16, 1999
48
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Thanks for your input. Ive been a fan of mei boards for a long time. Lately I have used gigabyte biostar ash's but msi has been a std for me for years.