Will SSD work with this motherboard?

[TheNiceGuy]

Edit:
Sorry, on iphone so bit rough.
The MB cost difference is only about $20 iirc, so not a big deal. Reviews were mixed on newegg, some doas, but maybe normal? I don't think i need future proofing features, just a solid MB.
Btw, From my previous builds, trying to add ram later didn't work. To avoid problems, I was told it needs to be exactly the same brand, sometimes production run. After a few years when I needed a boost, the technology was obsolete (new ram type requiring new MB), so future proofing ended up not really working for me on all my builds. That was the case for ram, sli, CPUs, etc. I know for enthusiasts that constantly tweek, or have easy access to used gear, that's not the case. but for meI've found the idea of building the system once, and totally new a few years later, worked well so far. Has something happened in pcs since I last built to justify negating this practice?
Jackstar, why the concern with MB firmware? Can't it be flashed, or is there a risk of bricking it or something new since I last built a PC?

 

[Termie]

You can't flash the motherboard bios if it doesn't support your cpu. You won't post at all.

RAM compatibility has improved greatly this generation. I had multiple problems with multiple socket 775 systems relating to RAM, but not a single one with socket 1156, 1366, or 1155.

8GB will probably be more than sufficient for a long time, but having the option to easily jump to 16GB would be nice. The cost difference you mention is comparing the B75 to the incompatible H61, I believe. If you really want to buy that to save money, get the Intel i5-2310 I mentioned earlier. It's compatible with H61.

 

[jackstar7]

Termie explained it exactly right. If you get a mobo that isn't compatible out of the box then you're stuck unless you get your hands on a compatible CPU to then flash the mobo to the new firmware/bios... which generally ain't easy to do in a pinch.

If the difference in $ is not significant to you, then I'd strongly encourage going to the B75.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

OK, thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.
Either of these MBs is OK? The difference is 4 RAM expansion slots for an extra $10?
If so, here's my final order list.

B75M R2.0 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000430510/?lid=ksearch_kakakuitem_image
Asus p8b75-m http://kakaku.com/item/K0000360494/?lid=shop_itemview_recommend_2
i5-3470 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000387671/?...ew_recommend_1
8gb RAM http://kakaku.com/item/K0000320521/
7870 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000353688/

 

[Termie]

OK, thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.
Either of these MBs is OK? The difference is 4 RAM expansion slots for an extra $10?
If so, here's my final order list.

B75M R2.0 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000430510/?lid=ksearch_kakakuitem_image
Asus p8b75-m http://kakaku.com/item/K0000360494/?lid=shop_itemview_recommend_2
i5-3470 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000387671/?...ew_recommend_1
8gb RAM http://kakaku.com/item/K0000320521/
7870 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000353688/

Put it this way - if you want to upgrade to 16GB in the future, it would work like this:

(1) On a two-slot board, you'd have to buy 2x8GB for about $100
(2) On a four-slot board, you'd have to buy 2x4GB for about $50

So, you're paying $10 to potentially save $50 later. If you're sure that you'll have no interest in upgrading this system later, then go ahead and save the $10. You won't need more than 8GB for games any time soon.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

OK thanks Termie. I'll order the P8B75-M in any case, as its easier through Amazon.
What would someone use more than 8gb RAM for?
Also, will the 4 physical cores be advantageous for video editing?

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Just ordered everything. Finally done with it all. Thanks again for your help everyone!
My final order was:
B75M R2.0 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000430510/?...kakuitem_image
i5-3550 http://www.amazon.co.jp/Intel-3-3GH...0EJW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364722462&sr=8-1
8gb RAM http://kakaku.com/item/K0000320521/
7870 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000353688/

You'll notice I swapped out the i5-3470 processor for an i5-3550. Searching around I found that on Amazon japan for exactly the same price, and apparently its a bit faster.
Anyway, thanks again!

 

[Termie]

Just ordered everything. Finally done with it all. Thanks again for your help everyone!
My final order was:
B75M R2.0 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000430510/?...kakuitem_image
i5-3550 http://www.amazon.co.jp/Intel-3-3GH...0EJW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364722462&sr=8-1
8gb RAM http://kakaku.com/item/K0000320521/
7870 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000353688/

You'll notice I swapped out the i5-3470 processor for an i5-3550. Searching around I found that on Amazon japan for exactly the same price, and apparently its a bit faster.
Anyway, thanks again!

Congrats! You are going to love this system. It's a huge upgrade from what you currently have. That i5-3550 is a very fast chip and will allow your 7870 to operate at full potential in every game currently available.

Just FYI, your 7870 has a 5% overclock out of the box, and while it probably has plenty of headroom, you won't need it yet. I do recommend bumping up the memory clock from 1200 to 1250. In my testing of two 7870 cards, that first memory bump produced the biggest gains by far, on the order of an additional 4% of performance. That's free performance that will not strain the card at all.

Also, when you play Battlefield 3, you can go straight to full ultra settings at 1080p. It will hold close to 55fps. At 1680x1050, it will be close to 65fps. If you want even more guaranteed smoothness, use a custom setting to run full ultra except for deferred antialising, which you should reduce from 4xAA to off.

For your reference, I just upgraded a system from an HD4830 to an HD7870. It was at least 4x faster in the benchmarks I ran. You'll have a similar bump going from the HD4850. The VRAM alone will make a big difference in the settings you'll be able to use.

 

[jackstar7]

Just ordered everything. Finally done with it all. Thanks again for your help everyone!
My final order was:
B75M R2.0 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000430510/?...kakuitem_image
i5-3550 http://www.amazon.co.jp/Intel-3-3GH...0EJW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364722462&sr=8-1
8gb RAM http://kakaku.com/item/K0000320521/
7870 http://kakaku.com/item/K0000353688/

You'll notice I swapped out the i5-3470 processor for an i5-3550. Searching around I found that on Amazon japan for exactly the same price, and apparently its a bit faster.
Anyway, thanks again!

I hope we hear back how it all works out for you and that everything arrives working for you straight away.

Enjoy!

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thanks guys. Good info Termie, I've never adjusted a memory clock. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.
These components are pretty new, I should be safe just dropping them in with the firmware and drivers they come with? I like to have a simple system without a lot of bloatware and drivers I don't need, but I realized its been maybe 5 years since my last hardware upgrade so I'm rusty. Hope I don't forget anything.

 

[mfenn]

Don't use the drivers that come on the disk, they are old. You should be able to grab everything that you need from ASRock and AMD.

 

[jackstar7]

Don't use the drivers that come on the disk, they are old. You should be able to grab everything that you need from ASRock and AMD.

Agree strongly. Also I suggest loading them onto a flash drive to have handy when you first fire up the new rig.

Assuming you have an OS that you're comfortable with, then you should be all set.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thanks guys. I saved the drivers I needed ahead of time on a spare HDD last time I reformatted and it worked well. Although I later had some driver complications. I want to make sure it goes smoothly this time. I'll start separate threads for the MB and GPU, that should be all I need.
I'll let you know how it all turns out.

 

[vailr]

If you were hoping to re-use the copy of Windows from the old machine: that may not work, if it wasn't a full retail copy.
That's assuming Windows licensing works similar in Japan as in the U.S..

 

[TheNiceGuy]

No worries, got that covered thanks.
My gear arrived today minus the gpu. That'll be a few more days possibly. I can setup and just use the integrated graphics, then drop in the gpu when that arrives with no driver or other conflicts?

 

[Termie]

No worries, got that covered thanks.
My gear arrived today minus the gpu. That'll be a few more days possibly. I can setup and just use the integrated graphics, then drop in the gpu when that arrives with no driver or other conflicts?

Definitely - go ahead and set it up without the GPU. In a way, that better, as it lets you sort out any bugs before you install the GPU, which could present other little bugs to work out.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

That's good to hear. Should I install all of these drivers and utilities, minus the "MAGIX" suite at the bottom? There are 2 VGA drivers - which one should I install, the latest?

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/B75M-DGS R2.0/?cat=Download&os=Win764

The AMD drivers I'll install later will apply to the video card only, nothing from this link:
http://sites.amd.com/US/GAME/DOWNLOADS/Pages/downloads.aspx
will be used on my chipset or audio drivers to create a conflict with the MB's ASROCK drivers, such as REALTEK?

 

[Termie]

That's good to hear. Should I install all of these drivers and utilities, minus the "MAGIX" suite at the bottom? There are 2 VGA drivers - which one should I install, the latest?

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/B75M-DGS R2.0/?cat=Download&os=Win764

The AMD drivers I'll install later will apply to the video card only, nothing from this link:
http://sites.amd.com/US/GAME/DOWNLOADS/Pages/downloads.aspx
will be used on my chipset or audio drivers to create a conflict with the MB's ASROCK drivers, such as REALTEK?

The critical ones are the Realtek audio driver, the INF driver (the chipset drivers), the Realtek Lan driver, the Intel USB 3.0 driver, and the VGA driver. I'd just pick the larger of the two VGA drivers - I have no idea what the difference is, but both released on the same date, so I figure the larger one will include everything.

There's no harm in downloading the other drivers, but I wouldn't install them until you have everything running smoothly. The Intel drivers listed add specialized features that I doubt you'd use.

As for the utilities, you actually don't need any of them, but I've used ASRock's XFast LAN and USB utilities, and they seem to help a bit. I wouldn't bother with the Extreme Tuning Utility given the motherboard you're using. The rest are up to you - again, I'd install them after you have everything running smoothly.

By the way, if you're concerned about conflicts between your video card and the onboard sound, you can do a custom installation of the AMD drivers and uncheck the HDMI sound drivers.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thanks a lot Termie. Drivers always make me uneasy. Every build I've done had driver related problems. I still have some problems on my current system I was unable to solve even with expert help, and it was chalked up to "possible driver conflicts".
I downloaded all the MB drivers, but will follow that procedure you outline. BTW, those 2 VGA drivers, after download the tag shows the smaller as supporting W8/7, while the larger supporting W7/Vista.

The GPU, I downladed the W7 64bit "Catalyst" driver. What about the "AMD Platform Drivers" section, and the "AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk Drivers" section?

 

[Termie]

Thanks a lot Termie. Drivers always make me uneasy. Every build I've done had driver related problems. I still have some problems on my current system I was unable to solve even with expert help, and it was chalked up to "possible driver conflicts".
I downloaded all the MB drivers, but will follow that procedure you outline. BTW, those 2 VGA drivers, after download the tag shows the smaller as supporting W8/7, while the larger supporting W7/Vista.

The GPU, I downladed the W7 64bit "Catalyst" driver. What about the "AMD Platform Drivers" section, and the "AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk Drivers" section?

For the VGA drivers, it seems you can probably use the smaller one, assuming you're using Win7 or Win8.

As for AMD, you only want the Catalyst drivers - none of the other items.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Right on. The hard parts done then.
I got to go to bed now, but I'll take another crack at this tomorrow. I discovered the MB doesn't accept my DVD drives IE cable, and must use a SATA. I can buy another new DVD drive, although I rarely use it, just mainly need it now to install my windows DVD. A few other options:
-$3 adapter shipped from china off ebay (will take awhile to get here)
-a nice working DVD drive in bricked Lenovo G550 laptop in the next room. (needs adapters I'm sure)
-install windows off an SD card?
Anyway, off to bed and will research more tomorrow.

 

[Termie]

Right on. The hard parts done then.
I got to go to bed now, but I'll take another crack at this tomorrow. I discovered the MB doesn't accept my DVD drives IE cable, and must use a SATA. I can buy another new DVD drive, although I rarely use it, just mainly need it now to install my windows DVD. A few other options:
-$3 adapter shipped from china off ebay (will take awhile to get here)
-a nice working DVD drive in bricked Lenovo G550 laptop in the next room. (needs adapters I'm sure)
-install windows off an SD card?
Anyway, off to bed and will research more tomorrow.

Is your old computer now disassembled? You could have used it to load the Windows DVD onto a (large) thumb drive or SD card (assuming you have an SD reader). Any other computers with DVD drives available to you now?

The laptop DVD drive isn't of much use without an adapter, and clearly, you can't mount it in the desktop case. But if you want to go that route, the adapter is a slimline SATA adapter, and is usually about $10 in the U.S.

The IDE/SATA adapter is a possibility - never tried one, so I can't say whether it will work. But judging from reviews, I'd say there's a 50/50 chance it won't work:

http://www.amazon.com/IDE-SATA-Adapter/dp/B000RK89M4
http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-ULT40322.../dp/B001TJ9P98

By the way, does your power supply have SATA power cables? You'd need them if you were to use a new DVD drive.

 

[mfenn]

By the way, if you're concerned about conflicts between your video card and the onboard sound, you can do a custom installation of the AMD drivers and uncheck the HDMI sound drivers.

Actually, don't do this. There are weird issues where the GPU won't be able to go into low power states if you don't install the HDMI audio driver. Having the extra audio device does not cause incompatibilities, you just set the onboard Realtek as your default sound device.

 

[Termie]

Actually, don't do this. There are weird issues where the GPU won't be able to go into low power states if you don't install the HDMI audio driver. Having the extra audio device does not cause incompatibilities, you just set the onboard Realtek as your default sound device.

Do you have any additional information on this? I did this with my HD7870 during testing recently and noticed that it wouldn't go into "long idle" with the monitor off. Could that have been the issue?

I actually have had issues with HDMI audio drivers in the past (on my GTX670 - causing bluescreens upon wake from sleep), so I typically don't install them if I'm using a monitor without sound capabilities.

 

[mfenn]

Do you have any additional information on this? I did this with my HD7870 during testing recently and noticed that it wouldn't go into "long idle" with the monitor off. Could that have been the issue?

I actually have had issues with monitor HDMI drivers in the past (on my GTX670 - causing bluescreens upon wake from sleep), so I typically don't install them if I'm using a monitor without sound capabilities.

I don't have a bug report or anything like that if that's what you're asking. I helped a friend out with his 7950 where it was constantly ramping up the fan while idle (temps were also rising). We couldn't find any program that would have been causing the GPU to kick on and GPU-Z showed no activity. On a whim, I ran the Catalyst installer again and noticed that there was no HDMI driver installed. I checked that box and the problems went away.