Guys which mobo should I take for 9700k? Now I have Asus z77 board,which served me very good for 6 years,I think Asus will be solid choise again? But they made so many boards for 390 socket,kinda difficult to choose. I don't need anything super special,just good quality board with 4-5 fan support,nvme m2,with good oc capabilities. Which one will be good choise?
For the past five years or so, I always went with a $100ish MSI for my personal builds, even pushing a 2700k to 4.8/5.0Ghz they did fine. When I got my Ryzen, I chose a more expensive model, X370 up a few notches, and it was honestly pretty disappointing. OC was poor, and XMP/Ram speeds were awful. Wouldn't run the Crucial 3200 past 2800 stable, and even testing 3733 no dice past 2933 with a little stability problems.
After the mediocre X370 board, I didn't really chalk it up to MSI going downhill, and chose an MSI 370 board for my 8700k build. What a nightmare. With a tester Pentium CPU it was fine. But with the 8700k it was literally unstable at stock speeds. Only by underclock and undervolt would it stay up long enough to install windows or play a game. After narrowing it down to the Mobo, I relegated it to a cheap htpc rig with the Pentium, and bought a Gigabyte Aorus 5 Gaming. Wow. Immediately everything just worked. Better still, it easily hit 6x50 with the 8700k on air cooling with 3733@4000. A later upgrade to an 8086k netted 5.2, though it is kind of wasteful chasing that extra 200Mhz, so I ended up setting up some custom XTU profiles to switch to only when I absolutely need max performance, settling around 4.8Ghz@6 for normal use.
Have proceeded to switch to Aorus boards for all other Coffee Lake builds, and they've been exceptional.
My theory is that CL simply demands better VRM quality than what I was getting with the mid tier MSI models. 4C Sandy to Kaby was fine with this, 6C CL seemed to be just too much, and I am sure my MSI 370 was a particularly poor one. But after my disappointing Ryzen experience (the Mobo, not the CPU other than weak OC), I didn't feel like risking even on a $150-$200 MSI board again.
TLDR, Aorus series is awesome. I'd compare them favorably to my experience with Asus ROG Formula series. But the last Asus I bought for personal use was a Maximus 990 for my 8320, woof what an expensive board.