Kind of! I like countless others experienced what a matx AM3+ board experience was like with a FX chip and found it particularly disappointing. Picked up a FX 6300 and a Gigabyte 78LMT-USB3 Rev 4.1 thinking it would make a half decent rig for not a lot of money. Except all it did was throttle. If the CPU so much as looked at full load for 2 or 3 minutes it throttled speed down, even at stock speeds. No way to stop it in the bios and the only way to get it to stop was to mess about in overdrive every boot, not ideal. I then found a board that may have gone under the radar somewhat and thought I would give it a whirl.. Another Gigabyte 78LMT-USB3 But this one is special because instead of being blue, it's black So what's could possibly be special about a motherboard that costs £38 delivered to my door? This single option: This means I can with a bit of care get a MATX board to take a 8 core FX chip and do: No throttling, even with a little cheeky overclock Obviously don't take the piss, this isn't going to take a 8 core chip that much further without coming into throttling again but its still quite impressive, just remember to keep a fan on the VRMS (would do this with all AMD builds anyway tbh). Would be a great board for a FX6300, would say you would get pretty good mileage out of one. £38 well spent
Bloody bonza ! If the board is 4+1 or 4+2 then 4.3ghz will be your brick wall. The reason you can hold those clocks is simply because the VRMs actually have some heatsinks on. My Asus is only 4+2 yet thanks to the reasonable heatsinks I too can get 4.3ghz out of my 8320 You've made quite the find there !
Any chance you can update the other boards bios to this one? The hardware appears to be exactly the same bar the colour
There is a beta bios floating about for the 4.1 (not on website) but the 5.0 works out the box. You can't flast the 5's bios to the 4.1, bios image is twice the size. Its also difficult to say they are identical unless someone wants to pop the vrm sinks off and compare. The USB controllers are different also. Just know this is the only matx I'd recommend sticking a fx in.
I bought exactly the same mobo from CCL before christmas, its running flawlessly with my FX-8320, Although I haven't tried any overclocking. Only reason I bought the board was because it was cheap, might have to see what I can get from it.
Straight out the box it will still throttle like most AM3+ boards. Turn off turbo core and that drops the stock vcore down about 0.1 to somewhere in the 1.35's, which obviously puts less strain on it. You cant manually under volt this boards so you need to do this. Then turn APM off and you should find it will do upto 4.2/.3 ghz quite happily without throttling. As you have a FX8320 that could be quite a boost
Okay, derp question time. What exactly is stopping board makers actually releasing a decent mATX board for AMD? They seem to manage fine for Intel right down to ITX, so I don't understand what the problem is on the AMD side?
No definite answer, perhaps its the power requirements and perceived demand of enthusiast boards on the matx factor? I am sure it could be done if a maker set their stall out, there are some pretty meaty Intel smaller form factor boards about. With the FX stuff you are often limited by the motherboards ability to churn out the power, hence most AM3+ boards of any worth have fairly hefty VRM cooling solutions and 8+ phases. Maybe cramming this in on a MATX board isn't as easy to implement or design as the intel stuff? That said I have no idea why there isn't a 990X/FX chipset MATX regardless of its power circuitry, seems daft we are stuck with a ancient 760 chipset! Its around 6 years old!
According to a friend I have at Asrock (a woman right up there at the top of the company with direct links to Taipae) it's because the 990FX does not have onboard graphics, nor does the CPU. That means that for smaller rigs you need a discrete GPU which makes them less desirable. She basically ruled out ITX completely because of the GPU. Now with the MATX? laziness. They've just released bios updates for Phenom 2 boards to make them support the FX logically without taking the physical side of things into account. IE - weak crap power phases with no cooling on. Logically there is nothing stopping any of these companies from making MATX and ITX boards that will support the FX but I think they're all just guilty of neglecting AMD. With Mantle, HSA and Windows 8* things are slowly changing, so we could see a decent MATX board yet. *Windows 8 just completely changes the FX CPUs. I saw all 8 cores being evenly loaded in Borderlands 2 last night, a game that doesn't support 8 cores. It seems the OS can actually set and spread the loads around, which would go a a way to explaining just why FX CPUs are so much better in Windows 8. In Windows 7 your only hope is a patch, but it's flaky at best.
Just to Necro this thread; My mate has the 4.1 version of this board. Do we think the 8320e (95w version) throttle? He desperately needs and upgrade (X3 435 at the moment) and can’t really afford to upgrade his motherboard etc.
The 4.1 will work ok just will throttle like mad when all 8 threads are loaded. I would try it as a x3 to a 8320 will be such a upgrade a little throttling wouldn't be a major issue, id bet under gaming it wouldn't do it anyway.
fixed that for you looking at the product images online by gigabyte there very deceptive. It looks a lot blacker than in reality :/ I find this happens a lot not just with gigabyte, made a MSI rig recently for a friends and it looked like a complete black PCB but was in fact dark brown.
Thanks Mr Bungle! Were you surprised to see this thread bumped to the top again? You are right though, how often do you actually fully load 8 threads when gaming anyway? What about something like the 8320? You think it'd handle that?
