Recommend me the cheapest AM3+ Board with more than 8 year lifespan

[john5220]

Folks I am looking for a Board for a FX 6300 chip I am about to buy.

Might buy the FX 6350 if it goes cheap enough aswell but from benchmarks the 6350 is hardly any better in performance. so I think I might want to skip it!!

Budget is $400 USD

I need with this budget a CPU, Mainboard, 4GB of RAM and new video card.

Already have a stick of 4GB RAM home. so just need one more to make it 8

Primary use is for Battlefield 4 multi player and Unreal Engine 4 for video game development for school and indie projects. So need lots of multi threading lots of cores here.

I have a haswell Pentium G with 1150 mainboard but putting a fx 6300 in this and a new board is still cheaper than spending $200 on a i5

And besides my board is a cheapo $40 ECS board who knows when this thing might fail in future and if I would even get a new board to replace.

But yes a fx 6300 and new board is much cheaper than a i5. Intel sucks!!
And is near identical performance in applications that support 6 threads for where the 4 threads of the i5 stops the 6 threads of the slower AMD matches it.

 

[john5220]

would solid capacitor mainboard give me the long lifespan I want?

 

[Cerb]

Keep $300 in a checking account, for PC parts failures.

My last mobo was a good OCer, stable, had solid caps, efficient VRMs, and all that jazz. It lasted a bit over 6 years, running both CPU and RAM undervolted almost the entire time. Many such boards are still running great, even some now going on 13 years old, from the same maker, with wet caps and missing power phases.

Some will last like that, and some won't. Your best bet would be to use less power, so less heat gets generated during load/idle cycling, and to get a nice power supply, along with a good mobo. The main thing for a mainboard is just to not get one that's too much penny-pinching--you want the cost/performance/longevity decisions the engineers thought prudent, not what their managers wanted, to sell more boards to Acer for $350 desktops .

If you're going AMD with that budget, get one of the new E chips, not the FX-6300, at least.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Keep $300 in a checking account, for PC parts failures.

This.

The most expensive MB on the block from the most well-regarded manufacturer could fail in 10 years or 10 weeks. It's all odds. No guarantees.

That's why I tend to not overspend on motherboards. You can get a perfectly serviceable board for half the price of the premium kit, and odds are it will last until you upgrade it anyway.

 

[john5220]

wow didn't realize this.

Well I will still get the AMD board and CPU because I have a old stick of 2GB DDR3 ram lying around which I can use in my ecs 1150 mainboard with my pentium G and it just so happens I have a recent tower and powersupply along with hard drive that I got free from someone. aswell as a DVD burner LOL

So yup I can make a nice little sale from my haswell combo if I build up that system and put windows 7 on it. Could sell it to someone and reclaim everything because it would be an entire functioning PC.

I checked all the reviews including anandtech cpu bench comparison thingy on this site and the FX 6300 is on par with Ivy Bridge i5 in 6 threaded apps.

 

[kommisar]

I would strongly suggest just getting a cheap intel i5 and reusing your existing motherboard. Intel is almost always better in games. The only way to make the amd fx processors come close, is to overclock the snot out of them which is going to reduce your mb longevity.

If you insist on getting an amd motherboard I would suggest an

Asus M5A97 R2.0

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131873

This is the cheapest mb I could find that has a power circuit with sufficient quality to overclock an fx chip. Make sure you don't get the LE version which is not good for overclocking. If you want for information regarding power circuit quality see the data base here:

http://www.overclock.net/t/946407/amd-motherboards-vrm-info-database

You may also want to check out the article here that discusses vrms:

http://www.overclock.net/a/about-vrms-mosfets-motherboard-safety-with-high-tdp-processors

In addition, I would suggest using the stock cooler and not an aftermarket tower cooler because the stock cooler directs airflow down at the cpu and the vrms. Tower coolers do not and often increase the heat on the vrms causing the system to throttle even though the cpu has not reached a critical temp. If you insist on a aftermarket cooler I suggest something like Coolermaster Vortex Plus

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103084

This directs airflow down at the cpu and vrms and would maximize the system overclocking capacity.