20 Best Lga 1150 Micro Atx Motherboard (2022 Updated)

I’ve built roughly 10 computers from motherboard up. This is not my first rodeo. But I’m unable to even get past the BIOS setup on this motherboard. I have an internal SATA DVD, SSD (which is intended to be the OS drive) and HDD.

When I first turn on the computer, it shows the logo screen, and then a motherboard info screen showing my drives, and telling me to hit F1 for setup. It will remain on this screen forever, so f1 is the only option.

When I enter the BIOS setup, it lists all my drives under the attached devices, but initially showed nothing under the boot devices. When I saved and exited (it noted that I had not made changes), it black-screened.

It refused to do ANYTHING after being powered on until I gave up and connected the reset jumpers, at which point I was back at square one: A motherboard info screen that only let me enter BIOS. Over several cycles of this, I discovered that it will show the DVD as a boot device if it is plugged into SATA 1, but it will not actually boot from it.

It will also show a USB thumb drive as a boot device, but it will not actually boot from it. FINALLY, if I update the BIOS to the latest version, it will actually reboot to the logo / info screen, but it still doesn’t boot from devices and still black-screens after you enter and leave BIOS.

What’s more, looking online suggests that all of these are common problems for this general B360 series of ASUS motherboards. Searches for “ASUS Cannot find bootable devices” and “ASUS Blackscreen BIOS” show a number of hits, and many of them lead to forum posts with no actual solution.

On the website it said that it’s compatible with 9th generation of Intel CPU’s. So I’ve bought it with i5-9400F as a combo. On the box it only said that it’s compatible with 8th generation. And it didn’t work with i5-9400F, going into endless reboots that are apparently a sign of incompatibility.

I had to replace it with B365M motherboard that worked right out of the box. The B360M motherboard itself might be okay, but I totally dislike the way it was advertised and sold. What I’ve learned is that you would need a BIOS update for it to work with 9th generation, but for that you need to have 8th generation processor to able to get your PC running, which I didn’t have.

The motherboard itself works fine. I was able to install it and everything works. I bought this motherboard because of previous positive experiences with Asus motherboards. I was disappointed, and wouldn’t recommend it because the documentation is terrible.

One of the worst examples is the pin outs for “System Panel Connector”. These pin outs are for case controls and indicators such as drive activity, power, headphones and reset. These pin outs are not documented and I had to read them off of the silk screening on the motherboard itself.

Asus boards are always premium priced. I expect more for that premium.

Installed easily into my old Antec media center style case and left me plenty of room along the back to route wires, however, the placement of the PCIe x16 slot, the DDR memory slots and the Intel B85 effectively prevents use of double-width long video cards like my legacy eVGA GTX 6600.

I use this computer as the controller for some DLP-based 3D resin printers, so having all of the interfaces on the graphics card is ideal. The card is practically right on top of the tabs used to eject the DIMM from the slot.

That means that if I want to remove memory, I need to remove the video card – but – the double-width card completely covers the retention tab and sideways access is blocked by the heatsinked B85 chip.

The only way to get that out is to come from the back and that means removing the motherboard from the PC. After a lot of yanking and potential damage to the slot, I was able to get the card out. That is unacceptable and there should be some indication in the documentation that a double-wide card is *not* recommended by the manufacturer.

Unfortunately, the motherboard does not come with any print documentation, so you have to go online or print it off the driver CD. Other than that, the board appears to be working fine with my i3-4160 and 16GB of DDR3-1600 (2×8) SDRAM.

I’ll just try my best not to have to take anything part ever again or find a way to make my application work with the three video interfaces on the motherboard, assuming I can use all three at the same time.

(where are those darn instructions?) ;-).

Bought this along with an Intel Haswell 3. 2 Ghz dual core to put my nForce5/AMD Athlon X2 out to pasture that would overheat in 90F weather even the the case door off. Installation was a breeze, but ran into issues at POST where it would emit rapid short beeps and reset.

The lack of troubleshooting in the manual made it impossible to tell if this was an overheating alarm or not. Researched the issue from a laptop and found that reseating the RAM might solve it. Worked my way to the 3rd DIMM slot and it fired right up.

Windows 7/10 boots really fast from my Kingston SSD, but Linux Mint 17. 3 takes longer to boot on this system than my older one. I’ve confirmed “Power On By Mouse” and “Power On By Keyboard” working only from the PS2 port instead of from USB based devices.

Inexcusable in this day and age but not worth an egg deduction. Also, my 1600Mhz RAM is being detected at 1400Mhz instead of 1333Mhz and Gigabyte Support told me to downclock it manually (instead of issuing a BIOS update to correct the bug !) Regardless, this is my first Intel solution since an IBM XT back in the mid 1990s, and I’m loving it.

Temps hover between 30c and 40c. My sister’s fiance is gonna build her a new rig and I recommended the same parts to him.

This motherboard might be good, but the one sentarrived in plastic wrap, in an unmarked box. Obviously not provided from the manufacturer, probably used. The board doesn’t boot. If it manages to get output it shows a blue screen, no text, anything.

If I try to populate all my memory it doesn’t stop beeping, only attempts booting with one memory slot. It’s a very tight board, and I could deal with that if it actually worked.

Top to bottom, Asus truly has the best value for features. You can get a board that costs less but you will feel it. Asus has made the pledge that it will offer the same software and UI features on all its boards through the whole product line.

This is fantastic as it doesn’t force the buyer to buy an ROG or TUF board just to get, say, Fan Xpert support or access to 5-way Optimization (both of which work fantastically, by the way; FanXpert is the industry standard for fan controls, nothing else comes close).

It’s all there in the in from entry-level on up. I bought this for an office build. While H97 would have been just as good as Z97 I feel this board offered more differentiating hardware features than its H97 counterpart which are worth the money.

It’s a solid board and has done its job well so far. Overall you get A LOT of features for a reasonable price. That’s all I really want. ***To the guy who knocked an egg for not providing the specific networking you need, WHY didn’t you research this earlier? Why knock a product for NOT having a feature the product DOES NOT advertise? It would be like if I bought a black car and complained that it isn’t red.

Think about this. ***.

Alright. I used this board for my first PC Build. I do like my build and I am proud of my achievements. Now, at first, I was going to get a GIGABYTE MOBO, but I found the ASUS MOBO and thought to myself, I love the UEFI BIOS and it overclocks like a beast.

Now I really want to give this board a higher score. But I know this board is not worth a 5 star. It is much higher than a 4 star, and I definitely would recommend it to certain conditions, but I have to tell you that, and my this is just me, but the board is not there yet.

The PCIe x16 on the bottom of the MOBO is really hard for me to work with. Any graphics card or sound car or maybe even LAN/Networking Card will not fit because there is no space. It should have been a lot higher as my PSU is right underneath it, since it is a mATX case.

If the PCI slots were arranged like this: PICe x16 PCIe x1 PCIe x16 PCI then a full 5 stars would be present. This is a mATX and it should be known that there isn’t much space in a mATX case (CM N200) and that the most important parts should have space.

Sure this might be a bit ridiculous, but I am quite upset as I really was hoping to utilize that slot. Overall, still solid, easy to install motherboard and I give it my seal of recommendation (if you love ASUS and the Z97 UEFI BIOS) go and buy it.

I want to take off more eggs, but I won’t, because I know this motherboard would have probably been excellent with one stable installation of Windows 8. 1. I put myself through bad times and I accept that.

It’s still got great hardware! But, unfortunately, the features are lacking. if you need something that just *works* that can be overclocked easily for gaming on a budget then heck, get this board, by all means! I used the following parts with this board, -Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Quad-Core 4.

0GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor BX80646I74790K -Thermaltake Toughpower TPD-0750M – WD Purple WD20PURX 2TB SATA 6. 0Gb/s 3. 5″ Hard Drive – CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 8GB (2 x 4GB) CMY8GX3M2A1600C9A -ASUS R7250X-2GD5 Radeon R7 250X 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.

0 Video Card As a note on the RAM, only CMY8GX3M2A1600C9 is listed on the compatibility chart, not CMY8GX3M2A1600C9A. I had to manually clock the RAM to 1600 (it read it has 1333 probably because of the slight difference in compatibility) but no big deal, for it seemed to take the change without any fires starting or what not.

Also, gold. I love gold and black. Even though this motherboard made me want to strangle someone, it is definitely pretty.

Intel stopped manufacturing desktop motherboards in 2014. These desktop boards served as the “reference hardware” for countless developments of Operating Systems — especially Microsoft Windows. === The Intel DH87RL “Round Lake” mATX version was one of their best, and a fitting end of the era.

I have 3 of these motherboards, each with the Intel 7260-AC Wireless/Bluetooth cards. They are rock solid running Windows 7, 8. 1, and 10. === While I have examined Desktop boards from Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock, and others — none have yet achieved this balance of value and performance.

Until they (Intel) issues an update for the onboard HD video driver I have to use the ASUS video card. For anybody reading this please look on the board look for the AA number and update the BIOS, get the newest drivers for your Windows OS.

If you get the weird error for now (July 14th, 2013) use a secondary video card to temporarily fix the error. This issue is no fault of New Egg, but Intel needs to run their R&D Software dev team to write drivers that are stable.

I tested the drivers and verified it with windows sfc /scannow command and found the driver failure in this way. I am sure that NewEgg will get a ton of RMA’s for this product when its the MFG that is at fault here.

very nice work good

Pros: Does what it says on the box, looks very stable with no issues yet. I’ve paired this with an fx 8 core cpu and 8gb of ram to be able to play LoL and watch movies. I had an Asus equivalent mb before with a 6 core fx cpu and 4gb ram and the extra 4 I have now makes a huge difference Cons: Tiny annoying connectors.

Pros: Looks great. Easy to put together. Generally really happy with it. Cons: Load up times are slow. But that’s the only downside to it.

Well pleased with this item

I decided to build a home virtualization server for all purposes I could think of. Ideally, I wanted it to run every server I could think of running, plus an HTPC/gaming VM. Turns out GeForce cards are prevented from doing this.

Regardless – it is one beast of a machine and I love it. Here are all of the VMs I have now, and ones I plan to spin up: * Windows Server 2012 R2 (Primary Domain Controller) * Debian 7 (Splunk) * Debian 7 (OpenVPN) * Debian 7 (General tools, scripts, etc) * Windows 8.

1 Pro (General tools, scripts, etc) * FreeNAS 9. 3 (RAIDZ1 – 3x6TB for 10. 91TiB usable) * Planned: Postfix/Dovecot mailserver; Suricata IDS/IPS (possibly inline); Windows PKI Servers, Root CA and Signing CA; Minecraft/Starbound server This is all possible for a little over a grand, with an extra $750 going into my RAID drives.

I’ve got a 4GB flash drive w/ ESXi, with an “old” 250GB Crucial M500 as my main ESXi datastore and an “old” 240GB M500 that I plan on swapping in whenever I feel like transferring the data to an “old” 128GB Crucial M4.

Dem SSDs doe. I still have yet to really stretch my legs and see what ESXi is capable of, but my needs are fairly simple and I want to ensure as much uptime as possible – this is as much a lab as it is a production environment at home.

It took me about 2 weeks to get everything the way I wanted, hitting speed bumps along the way, resulting in me buying a SAS card and ditching my plans to use this machine as an HTPC/gaming rig. I didn’t plan on buying the SAS card but you can only pass through an entire AHCI controller to ESXi, meaning my datastore drives have to be on a different controller than my NAS drives, which I passed through directly to FreeNAS.

Raw performance tests on datastores are very pleasing, peaking around ~520MB/s read and ~430MB/s write to my 250GB Crucial M500 running ATTO Benchmark. RAM passed Memtest86 with flying colors. With all 8 vCores pegged with Prime95, the CPU never got above 52C after about 15 minutes.

It idles around 31-33C so I’m happy about that. Note: if you get low RPM fans, the mobo may detect the low RPM as being critically low, and will ramp all fans up to max RPM for a few seconds. This can be fixed by changing the thresholds with ipmitool.

Motherboard: Supermicro X10SLH-F-O (LGA1150) CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1246v3 3. 5GHz (so fast! like a 4790 but cheaper) RAM: 16GB Crucial Unbuffered ECC DDR3-1600 (CT2KIT102472BD160B) Case: Fractal Design Define Mini (not so Mini, but solid and monolithic) CPU Cooler: Corsair H60 Thermal Paste: Arctic Silver 5 (old faithful) Fans: 3x Noctua NF-F12 (2 front intake, 1 rear CPU exhaust – so quiet!) RAID/HBA controller: IBM ServeRAID M1015 (Community favorite – flashed to IT firmware) Datastore drives: Crucial M500 250GB, Crucial M500 240GB, Crucial M4 128GB (from old machines) FreeNAS RAIDZ1 drives: 3x 6TB Western Digital Purple (10.

91TiB usable) PSU: Corsair HX750 (from old gaming rig) Router/Layer 3 switch: MikroTik CRS125-2.

How to fix the fans. Open shell and type the following command ipmitool sensor list all From the list provided find your fan headers, FAN2 for example. You will need this for the next command to set your fans lower limits.

If you look across the columns you will see six sets of numbers. The fist three are the lower limits for the fan and the last three are upper limits. The first number is non recoverable limit, fail. The second is critical lower limit.

Third is lower non critical limit. Next three are upper limits in reverse order. So, now the command to fix the fan issue. Look up the specs for your fan and set these limits 100-200 RPM below the fans lowest rated speed.

In my case the fan is rated for 600RPM but can dip down to 500 tripping the default sensor. So, lets fix that. ipmitool sensor thresh FAN2 lower 200 300 400 This is case sensitive, so make sure you match the sensor as it is listed in the above list.

In my cas FAN1 FAN2 FAN3, and so on. Rerun the list command again to verify it worked. Repeat for all fans in the system.

I bought 5 of these boards for servers—deployed 3 and have 2 spares. I was drawn to the fact that they were about the only Micro-ATX Xeon boards with 4 LAN ports, ECC RAM, and integrated graphics that I could find.

NIC Teaming has worked well for me with them. Graphics aren’t great—e. g. they don’t fully support Windows 7 Aero—but they’re integrated, so it’s fine enough, and they can drive my 1600×900 pixel display and they work fine with my KVM switch.

I never used the IPKVM, so I can’t comment on it. I didn’t notice when buying, but there’s no sound, which isn’t UNcommon for a server board. Sometimes the BIOS boot gets stuck in a loop, but never more than a couple times—though I am a little worried that it will get stuck ad infinitum one day.

An update would probably solve that. Driver support from SuperMicro was a huge disappointment, as some are missing altogether, and some are only available for certain OSs. I deployed Win7, Win2008R2, and Win2012R2, and ended up having to use some Win7 drivers on 2008R2 (and maybe 2012R2, if memory serves).

Hindsight: I would have gone with something else, like maybe a mini-ITX solution with better driver-support and graphics and a PCIe NIC for teaming—as it would have been a similar price but in a nice small package, a bit less power, and better driver support, without much of a performance hit (or anything noticeable).

I’ll stick with these for the next few years though. Note that some drivers are missing for Server 2012 R2: “PCI Data Acquisition and Signal Processing,” and “SM Bus Controller. ” I was able to function without them, although I have no PCI Express components.

Packaging is not good at all. Who designed it? Board could be damaged because it just bounces around inside the box on its way here.

Ordered it as a replacement for a broken mainboard. The shipment was very fast, ordered it on a Tuesday at around 11 PM and got it on Friday. Mainboard was a little dusty, but that may have been due to the packaging.

Product is working fine as far as I can tell.

I built a great new Windows 7 system with a fourth gen I5 processor. It is all working perfect for a few months now. It came with the back plate which is nice. Good price and the people that sell this are knowledgeable.

They had a great auction with every bit of detailed information I wanted so no questions were necessary and it was packaged very well. Thanks.

The fastest this board will run memory is 1400Mhz. So either get a set of well timed 1333Mhz memory and use the XMP or a set of 1600Mhz and set the speed and timings manually. I already had a set of F3-12800CL8D-8GBXM 1600Mhz memory and have it running at the board’s max 1400Mhz speed and timed tCL 7, tRCD 7, tRP 7, tRAS 21, tRTP 6, tRRD 4, tWTR 6, tRFC 130, tWR 12, tWTP 22, tWL 6, tFAW 19 and it’s running rock solid.

Good motherboard if you’re going to run Windows 10 or Linux. Not so good for Windows 11.

When I first bought this motherboard I could not get it to boot correctly. It would POST fine but the second any OS started to load, it would power off. Called support and they had never heard of this issue before and didn’t know what was causing it.

Turns out, it was the power supply I was using. a Corsair 430W. For some reason this PSU requires a a certain load threshold or it will act strange. I was finally able to boot by hooking up extra HDDs to increase the wattage load but this is only a temporary solution.

Bottom line, don’t use a cheap power supply like I did. I also ran into the same fan issue mentioned in the other reviews. The CPU would constantly spin up and spin down. The real fix would be to buy a PWM fan that does not drop to 500RPMs but I’m lazy so I used the workaround.

Download IPMIutil and change the fan thresholds which is fairly straightforward by following the documentation.

Great server/workstation board. Here some info people may find useful: You can use any fan header for hooking up the CPU fan. The FAN speed is configurable via IPMI but has limitations. It assumes you are running server fans (high RPM).

If you install low RPM high efficiency fans (for a server hosted in an small business office) the fan controller thinks the fans are not functioning properly and is spinning up *all* fans to max RPM.

Then the fans RPM decreases because the temps were low anyway and controller thinks again that the fans are malfunctioning and spins them up to max. This will go on forever. There is no way to adjust the lower limit for the fan alert in IPMI.

Support did not have any solution. The fix for me was to change all the high efficiency fans from PWM (4 pin) to 3 pin by using the fan’s included adapters (Noctua). The fans still change speed with the load but because of the open feedback loop the controller stopped spinning them up to max.

I should have take one start from the review for the fan issue but given the workaround I’ll leave it in. BUT for someone planning to use the IPMI alerts for monitoring in a datacenter this is a deal breaker.

When upgrading the BIOS and/or IPMI firmware make sure you first upgrade the BIOS and then the firmware. If not you may brick your board. If you want to use the IPMI to remotely upgrade your BIOS you need to buy a license.

The part number you need is SFT-OOB-LIC. Search on Inet for it. It took more than one week to get it via email when there is not shipping involved. Add to this that this is an additional $20 instead of being included with he board.

You do not have to buy IPMI software to get to the IPMI UI. Just set the IPMI NIC IP address via BIOS and then just go to http://. If you want to get the remote console working you will have to install Java.

For the first time, I purchased a motherboard on eBay. com. I liked the price and took a chance. After global inspection of the board, I could not detect any repairs. After I installed the board and placed a processor on it and other needed parts, I tested the board.

No problems at all during power-up and after I found and installed the necessary drivers the board ran flawlessly.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this board. Its BIOS causes issues every step of the way, its layout is not that great, and it’s really not worth the money you save over a better brand or chipset. I previously had an MSI Z77 board, the BIOS was vastly better than the ancient junk on this board.

Also have messed with ASUS boards, their BIOS is also generally better and more functional than Gigabyte’s. Just avoid this brand in general, or at least their cheaper boards.

Great entry level workstation board. Has two PCI slots for pro audio cards. Supports the Intel Haswell refresh E3 Xeon CPU and has a socket for the Trusted Platform Module. Although four RAM slots are available, there is no support for ECC memory.

The color scheme is neutral black and gray, perfect for a business machine. Construction is top notch with solid caps and shielded chokes.

Good board, supports lots of RAM, lots of drive connectivity. Great NAS board.

Pros: Easy to install and connections clearly marked. BIOS setting straightforward. Cons: No problems at all.

Pros: cheap and cheerful with good expansion ports Cons: Would have liked more sound outputs from motherboard

There are quite a number of extremely thoughtful and extensive reviews already on this site so I will limit my comments to my peculiar circumstances with this board. For clarity, my experiences came on the following system: Zalman GS 1200 case, Zalman 9900 CPU Cooler, Asus Z87 Expert motherboard, 32 G G-Skills DDR3 RAM, Core i-7 4770K CPU @ 4.

6 GHz, 3G ATI radeon 7950 video, Total 11 Terabyte hard drive storage (W7,W8 & W8. 1 on separate SSD boot drives (W8. 1)Samsung 840 Pro 256G, (W8)Crucial M4-CTI128 G, (W7) OCZ Vertex3 128 G), 46″ Philips monitor, Logitech wireless keyboard & mouse, Logitech Z series speakers, APC UPS system, all circuits dedicated on GFI; Rosewill RBR1000-M PSU The first board “bought the farm” in under a month.

Early performance was slower than aniticpated. The second board arrived in early September ’13 and although it ran reasonably well, I was disappointed. It began to have issues. unexplained freezes, random reboots, BSOD’s and it began to slow down.

I performed a battery of tests on all the components. Memtest, stress routines and so on. nothing pointed to a culprit other than the board itself, I contacted Asus support again, provided a document explaining all the testing done and the results.

The next board arrived very quickly and lasted less than a week. Asus cross-shipped the next board and when I installed it, it failed to POST. Throughout my dealings with Asus support I have received nothing but the best in rapport and cooperation.

The fact that I have used well over one hundred Asus boards in building systems for myself, family and friends, coupled with the rare instances of a defective product and the immediate and helpful Asus support group that I will continue to use Asus boards in all my projects.

Every component in a computer has the potential to fail and cause grief. what happens when you deal with the manufacturer is where the deal is sealed or broken. Asus, in my experience, does not believe in breaking deals or customer confidence in their products.

In the end, I gave 4 eggs, solely due to the frequency of the problem. As I run this board through it’s paces I will update the status of the Z87 – Expert mobo.

I should have invested in motherboards. My 7 year old board died and I was blown away to see that their price had tripled since I bought mine in 2013, despite being for an obsolete socket. Luckily, I was able to snag this here analogous refurb unit for a little less than what I paid new for mine 7 years ago.

Works perfectly, no issues. It just feels wrong to me that it still costs about as much as a new unit used to.

Overall it’s a good entry level board for your i5, i7 CPU. I’m running with the Haswell i5 and it POSTED perfect first time. The USB does seem to be a bit flaky, but a BIOS update will probably resolve it.

Any of the minor inconveniences alone wouldn’t be a big deal, but all combined it’s worth dinging a couple of stars. I would like to have seen more SATA cables included as 2 simply isn’t enough, but like most geeks I have a drawer full of SATA cables, so I dug into my stash.

The RAM slots are *very* close to the CPU. I’m running the stock Intel cooler, but depending on the size of what cooler you’re running, you might not be able to fit the RAM in there against it. My RAM chips have large heat spreaders and they fit.

barely.

I bought a Gigabyte Z270 mobo to replace this one and I am having problems with the system powering on and off and it still won’t post. I’m going to swap out the PSU tomorrow (I am using a brand new EVGA 850 BQ right now) to eliminate that possibility.

After further research it seems these problems are common to Z270 boards with the Gigabyte models having serious isses with BIOS instructions for “Intel Optane Memory” snarling XMP profiles. This shouldn’t be a problem for me since I only plan on using one RAM stick for a mining rig but is probably a deal breaker for all other builds.

I would recommend you steer clear of these Z270 models–it’s not worth the money and hassle. You have been warned!.

While this motherboard boasts awesome features, connectivity and performance, it’s guilty of one of the most egregious cost-cutting sins in modern motherboard manufacture – a detached backplate. Strap yourself in for at least a half-hour of frustration slotting the thing in to the back of your case, bending out the metal tags and then repeating when it pops off the back.

You’re not going to get any better for the price, but consider installing the backplate first and holding it in place with tape or something while you correctly seat the motherboard. Don’t expect the manual to help you either.

Otherwise, I’m a big fan (mine fits on there perfectly).

Worked as hoped. Replaced my MSI Z97 motherboard using the CPU and 16gb ram in the ASUS board. After installing the replacement board & booting into the BIOS, I made the necessary selections & booted again using my SSD drive that had Windows 10 installed.

It booted with “NO Hickeys or Upchucks” at all & worked flawlessly. Prior to Windows 10, if you changed motherboards, I have never had these good results. Thank God!.

Bought this to replace Dell matx board (which I mostly just bought for its i7 4770). The Z and even H boards were/are still very much in demand and I think this chipset is overlooked or at least not really talked about.

Being new to this I was easily able to OC to 3. 8ghz. I went with this board because I’m not a diehard gamer, just wanted to make the most of what components I already had, and this allowed me to make a pretty respectable midrange gaming rig on the cheap that can handle 4k desktop and 1080p gaming easily.

I also love that this features a great variety of display outputs, has 4 DIMMs, sata 3 and USB 3. Outstanding features at a great value. Only potential issue I had is no access to 2 of the 6 sata connectors with graphics card installed, but I only need 3 anyway.

First, people need to understand these Q series motherboard are for offices and designed for backward compatibility for old office equipment that is very expensive to replace and need to stay in place.

The legacy chipset will allow old operating systems to run on this board without loading drivers as they’re built-in in most cases. My workstation gaming rig didn’t support SLI so I tried to use this board until I got a replacement.

Unfortunately this board doesn’t support SLI, but it does support CFX (crossfire). Why no nvidia love? also, both video cards blocked a pair of SATA ports. ASUS went to the trouble to put 3 pairs of SATA ports on the board, why under the video slots? There is seemingly plenty of room to move them to a better place, or do as others have suggested and turn the connectors pointing toward the front edge.

To the guy who has two boards burn up. They sound like operator errors. 2 bad boards are too rare and usually incompatibility with parts issues. but 2 boards that burn up are too likely installation error.

To the guy with no VT-d. This board does support VT-d, but your processor needs to support VT-d as well. Check your CPU and leave a bad review for Intel for not having VT-d support for all of their chip series like AMD does.

I had two issues after installing Windows 7 with this board, both of which were 100% fixable, so let me save anyone with similar issues some time: 1. After a soft reboot, or even a logout/login, the ethernet port would no longer detect the network.

Long story short, going into the ethernet driver settings and disabling the green ethernet and energy efficient ethernet settings completely fixed this. Apparently, these settings adjust the voltage of the port depending on the length of the cable it detects.

I was using a long cable and it didn’t seem to like that, but disabling those driver settings fixed the problem completely. I doubt that the ethernet port is going to add anything to your electric bill if you turn these off.

2. I had set one of the SATA ports to eSATA, AHCI, “hotswap enabled” in the BIOS and connected it to my case’s front eSATA port. With the standard Microsoft drivers, hotswap didn’t work at all. It would detect a drive if it was plugged in and powered on at boot up, but wouldn’t let you eject it, and wouldn’t detect it if you hooked it up after bootup.

Installing the AHCI driver from the motherboard’s website completely fixed this. I hadn’t installed it initially because the site seemed to suggest that it was an install-time driver meant to help you install Windows if it didn’t detect the drives.

Well, it did detect the drives, so I hadn’t installed it. This driver is the only one on the motherboard’s site that doesn’t have its own installer, so I wasn’t sure if I should replace the Microsoft driver.

In short, install the motherboard’s version of the driver manually if you want to assign a SATA port to eSATA (you should probably install it anyway, even if you aren’t). Neither of these issues was worth deducting an egg over, as they really aren’t problems with the board itself and they are completely fixable.

I do think that Gigabyte should make it clear on their site that the AHCI driver isn’t just an install-time driver, and that you should install it even if Windows detects the drives with the standard Microsoft drivers, but that’s not anything serious.

adjusting only the multiplier, i could only get it overclocked to 3. 6ghz. i thought the g3258 was a dud. but i researched more about all the other settings i could play around with. i ended up setting (1) memory to 1333mhz, (2) uncore ratio to 32x and (3) cpu core voltage to max 1.

2v. this booted to 43x but it was only stable at 41x cpu clock multiplier. temps were no higher than 73c even with the cpu fan at 75%. i unplugged the case fan, so the only other cooling is from the psu fan.

my system power consumption at idle is about 40w measured at the wall with a kill-a-watt, and that’s just with 2 dimms of ram, cpu fan, single ssd. adding mechanical hdd adds about 5 watts each to idle.

running intel stress test on the overclocked system pushed power consumption to about 90w. i have an old thermaltake tr2 430w, and i think that may contribute to the unstable overclocks over 4. 1ghz, so i would be inclined to try a better psu.

good luck with your own overclock!.

Specs: Intel Pentium G3420 3. 2GHz (Stock HSF) 8GB G-skill Sniper Gaming Series XFX Nvidia GeFroce 9800 GT 512MB Ultra LSP 650W ATX PSU Transcend 128GB SSD Western Digital Blue 250GB HDD I also have really generic case from E-machines that was made from like the early 2000s, that was put in storage a few years ago when it was a PC but stopped working.

I’m just using it because it’s all I have for a case and it holds all my components. The whole front panel, like the front USBs and front audio jacks don’t work, but it’s not like i’m going to be using that anyway.

It doesn’t have any case fans or any internal cooling, so I just have the side panel off to get some decent air flow in there, and it tends to be pretty cool in there, unless if I play a game like Battlefield 3, especially with the GPU I have, it gets pretty warm in there, but nothing to threatening.

I plan on getting a new CPU cooler so I can have my processor more cooler, and a new case so my setup doesn’t look so mediorcre and have some internal cooling.