ASRock 970 EXTREME3 Socket AM3+/ AMD 970/ AMD Quad CrossFireX/ SATA3&USB3.0/ A&GbE/ ATX Motherboard
3 thoughts on “ASRock 970 EXTREME3 AMD 970 & SB950 ATX DDR3 800 AMD – AM3+ Motherboard”
Comments are closed.
Build, Repair, Upgrade & Maintain your PC
Comments are closed.
Great Gaming Board for Budget Minded Gamers,
Purchased this motherboard about a month ago. It is really a great buy! Teamed with the budget minded NVIDIA GeForce GT 550 1GB graphics card and a WD 500gb hard drive,AMD FX-4100 4-core processor, 4gb of RAM & Windows 7 64 bit Home Operating System and this baby really rocks! It runs Battle Field 3 at optimum settings and gives a frame rate of 75 to 100! This is the motherboard you want for great gaming fun on the cheap! Recommended this motherboard to several of my friends for consideration of upgrades. You too, need this motherboard.
Was this review helpful to you?
would be five stars but first one DOA,
This mobo would have definitely recieved five stars IF the first one was not DOA. computer would not start up and it was just a complete disaster. When the second one came, thanks to the amazing Amazon return/exchange policy, my build was up and running fine. It has all the modern inputs and has future proof am3+ slot when the amd fx processors are hopefully revised. But for now I have a phenom II x4 965. This mobo has no problem overclocking it to 4ghz with the configuration of bus speed of 200mhz with 20x multiplier. I did not want to touch the bus speed as it required adjusting my ram speed. This mobo does not have a onboard graphics card, which is fine because most of them are horrible anyways.
On the second board i received, I thought it had an onboard audio issue as nothing was being detected. After hours I found out that you cannot adjust volume levels until something is PLUGGED into one of the ports (usually the green one) based on the speaker configuration. Overall I am very happy that I gave asrock another chance. This was a full atx mobo at only 90 dollars. Go asrock and AMD (intel is too expensive, both cpu and mobo) Don’t be a intel fanboy when AMD can perform just as well.
This mobo does come with a feature called UCC (unlock core something) which is pretty much an all in one cpu core unlocker/overclocker. I think this is meant for older amd processors that had a core turned off due to the possible defects (hence the release of x3’s). Because I was curious, I turned it on, and saw that I still did have 4 cores, but my bus speed was overclocked to 250 with a 16 multiplier and the northbridge speed was set to 2500. That was quite a jump so I just disabled, especially because higher cpu voltages were read. Speaking of the BIOS, there are many options from controlling fan speed to overclocking your ram.
Oh on another note, you should always set onboard graphics to ENABLE not auto when a graphics card is installed because if you don’t you get problems with the hardware confusing which audio to use, usually defaulting to the graphics card audio through the hdmi. You do not want that.
I was worried that the coolermaster 212+ would cover some ram slots… but that was not the case! I could use all four even though I am currently only using one. In short, this mobo is very compatible with pretty much anything (sorry no intel allowed here), it seems pretty durable and has caused no problems so far! My friend has a asrock matx mobo on his 2500k build for over a year and is has been running great!
Computer build:
asrock 970 extreme3 mobo
phenom II x4 965
gtx 550 ti
ram kingston hyperx 8gig 1600
haf 912 case
Was this review helpful to you?
Asrock 970,
I bought this board and paired it up with a phenom II quad core and 8gb of ram. Good mobo for gaming. Have to disagree with the first review, the motherboard does have 2 pci-xpress x16 slots, but when you run them in crossfire one runs at 16x and the other runs at 4x. But overall a decent mobo for the price.
Was this review helpful to you?