MSI 770-C45 AM3 motherboard review summary

A good AMD motherboard should have at least  the following features: 4 DIMM slots and an AM3 socket. This MSI 770-C45 motherboard meets those requirements. Other notable specs:

6 SATA, 0 eSATA.

2 PS/2 port

1 COM port

6 USB

No onboard video.

6-core CPU support.

NO Core unlocking.
No floppy connector. 

There aren't any mainstream reviews of this board.

This blogger has a short post for the PRO version which doesn't say much more than you can learn from reading the specs.Note: I'm discussing the non-PRO version here, which has 1 more SATA, one less eSATA, and no crossfire support.

Trusted Reviews - doesn't say much more than reading the specs will tell you.

Newegg has 102 customer reviews. The following negative comments were noted:

• 12 DOA
• 7 people had stability problems
• 4 failed fail in the first couple months
• 2 people said the manual was unreadable/useless. 
• 1 person said the on-board audio quality was "terrible"

The NewEgg reviews are quite negative. I would avoid this board, as it doesn't seem to offer much over more highly rated boards that cost only $10 more. 

ASUS M4A77TD AM3 770 ATX AMD Motherboard review summary

A good AMD motherboard should have at least  the following features: 4 DIMM slots and an AM3 socket. This ASUS M4A77TD motherboard meets those requirements. Other notable specs:

6 SATA, 0 eSATA.
1 PS/2 port
1 COM port
6 USB
No onboard video.
Express Gate - Instant on Linux distro.
Turbo Key (a blast from the past!) use the power button to cycle over-clocking features on or off.
6-core CPU support.
Core unlocking.

There aren't any mainstream reviews of this board.

This blogger has a short post for the PRO version which doesn't say much more than you can learn from reading the specs.Note: I'm discussing the non-PRO version here, which has 1 more SATA, one less eSATA, and no crossfire support.

Newegg has 103 customer reviews.

• 3 people flat out couldn't get it to work at all;
• 1 had problems getting windows installed
• 1 had stability problems 
• 1 had a failure within first week of use. 
• 3 people complained about the sound card, but didn't explain why (not Linux users). 2 more said Linux support for the sound card was difficult - they had to make sure they used the latest ALSA drivers. 
• several people marked their reviews down an 'egg' because it supports legacy ports (COM/PS2, parallel). What idiots. This highlights the problem with trusting newegg reviews. 

Postscript: I decided to buy the m4a77TD, and have set up the m4a77td blog, with a full review and discussion of  various issues, etc.

ASRock M3A770DE Motherboard - AM3 socket notes

A good AMD motherboard should have at least  the following features: 4 DIMM slots and an AM3 socket. This ASRock M3A770DE motherboard meets those requirements. Other notable specs:

4 SATA, 2 eSATA.
2 PS/2 ports
0 COM ports
No onboard video.
3 PCI - but one is blocked by Floppy connector and CDROM analog audio in port.
Instant boot - software addon that speeds up WinXp/Vista boot time.
Core unlocking support.

Price (4-25-10): $60 from newegg.

ASRock is a spinoff of ASUS, so they should be relatively trustworthy.

The big plus of this board is the price. The minus: 2 less SATA ports than most, and no COM port (most don't have these anymore, though).

Tweaktown has a review. It doesn't really say much you couldn't tell from reading the specs.

Newegg customer reviews are mostly positive. Out of 74 reviews, the only negatives that showed up were

• The raid support is not very stable
• One person had lots of stability problems that sounded like a bad MB
• One person had a heat-sink pop off.
• 3 people had the board fail within a few hours of first use (I wonder if it is heatsink problems?).
• One person found that a CPU which could be core-unlocked on another MB would not unlock and run without crashing on this one (plenty of other people comment that core-unlocking did work for them). 

Sounds like a reasonably high quality board, especially given the price. On the other hand, $25 more buys you an ASUS MB of similar specs + 2 more SATA ports.

Selecting an AMD motherboard for 2010

There are a lot of cheap motherboards in the $60 range, and a lot in the $100 range. Going cheap, however, may be more expensive once you factor in the cost of other components.

For instance, DDR3 2GB ram is $60/piece. DDR 4GB ram is $250 (prices crucial.com). So if you get a cheap MB with just two ram slots, you are pretty much limited to 4GB of ram, at least at economical prices. 4GB might be enough for anybody (today) but for how long? Ram usage seems to go up a lot quicker than CPU usage.

Selecting a CPU for 2010

According to Tom's CPU charts, there is a measurable difference between the fastest and slowest CPUs they tested in 2009. This is not surprising. But the difference is not that huge, either.  For now, I'm considering AMD chips only, due to Intel's offensive use of patents and lawsuits over the years.

For instance, 3DS Max rendering can be sped up by a factor of 2.2 by upgrading from a AMD Athlon II X2 240 Regor 2.8GHz ($53) to a AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz ($186). Not all benchmarks benefit as much, though. MP3 encoding with LAME is only 1.2x faster.  Adobe Premiere is 2.5x faster, and FarCry has 1.4x the FPS. The difference between scores has to due with whether the application is multi-threaded. Content creation, therefore, has the best chance of significant speed-up, but it's certainly less than linear, with respect to cost. Modern video games benefit as well, but will tend to depend much more on your video card. 


This suggests that the cheap-ass approach would be to buy a good MB with a cheap CPU now, and then upgrade later.  Unfortunately, the latest AM3 sockets don't support AM2 CPUs. So you'll have to buy the cheapest AM3 CPU you can find ($53, as quoted above), if you want the longest upgrade path (AM3 was released in Feb 2009, so it should be around for a while).  AM3 supports DDR3, whereas AM2 only supports DDR2.

DDR3 costs $120 for 4GB (crucial.com). DDR2 costs $116-$134 (depending on speed) for the same GB. So it looks like the price has mostly equalized. Meanwhile DDR1 is $300 for 4GB, which goes to show: don't get stuck on an old technology - it's not going to be cheaper forever.