Should I buy a cheaper motherboard for Haswell?

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song414

Limp Gawd
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Jan 7, 2006
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I have always used cheaper motherboards due to me not needing the bells and whistles.

I have a Soundblaster Z dedicated sound card so could care less about a sound chip on the mobo, I have 2 SSD's and a 1 TB HDD so I don't need like 6-8 6GB/s sata ports, I also don't need like more than 2 USB 3.0 ports in the back nor do I see myself using SLI/XFire in the near future. I usually stick with a higher end single GPU solutions, although that option would be nice for the future down the road but I don't think that option is worth more than a $10 premium in my eyes.

Now I do plan on overclocking my CPU/GPU. I know some boards do better than others but if its a 100-200mhz difference on the cpu for like $50 more then I think it is hardly worth the value. I am looking for the best bang for buck here.

I am going to MicroCenter in a short while to pick up a mobo/cpu combo and plan on getting a 3670k. Now there is a considerable spread in price in the mobo combos. Link:

http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx

Now under the mobo combo the MSI and the Asus on the lower end of the price caught my eye and are the two choices I am contemplating. My budget I set myself for about the best price/performance ratio was ~$300.

How are MSI motherboards? I've only ever used Asus/ASRock before and my current mobo is an ASRock that crapped out on me after ~3 years.
 
The only one I would consider in that lineup is the sabertooth. Nothing great about the mobos they have on sale...
 
Yeah, the only one I would've bought if I had no choice would've been the Sabertooth. It's got a 5 year warranty on it if you're afraid of it crapping out on you after 3 years.
 
What do you guys think about the msi gaming series? Building a rig for a friend and he wants to keep the cost reasonable and will probably stick to one video card but wants the option of sli.

Also shopping at microcenter.
 
I would choose the Gigabyte UD4H. Not impressed by Asus's lineup at all, and a few too many horror stories about Asus RMA service. The G41 is not capable of SLI.
 
I meant the msi g45 and g65 they are listed as available in the Rockville microcenter. The gigabyte board looks good and I do love my sniper m3
 
FYI, all 1150 mobos are eligible for the $40 combo, and there are a lot more than available than the 12 listed on the MC site (eg. UD3H, UD5H, Extreme6).
 
Buy based on the features you want. Any 1150 Z87 motherboard from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock that are at least $120 would be more than good enough.
 
would these work with the new Xeon Haswell v3 cpu's too?

say a b85 mobo with the xeon
 
Same reasoning as the OP here. One video card, a couple of HDD's and an SSD or two is all I need.

If you had any doubt about the desktop enthusiast market, just look at all the different Z87 boards coming out already. There's clearly a market for this kind of stuff.

Personally, I went with the GA-Z87X-D3H. It was slightly cheaper than the Asus, has a PCI slot and looks well built from the pictures (heatsinks and caps/mosfets around the CPU socket). I wouldn't go with one of the most "empty" boards as far as power delivery goes. However I think you'll run into thermal limits long before you need any of the premium overclocker/gaming boards (unless you de-lid and use exotic cooling).
 
How are MSI motherboards?
Click to expand...

I've been using an MSI Z77 G45 with my 3570K for a little over a year now. (Prior to that, I used mostly Intel motherboards.)

I've been impressed with the product. It's been solid. The BIOS has been bug-free. And I've run a variety of hardware in it, both AMD and NVidia cards, along with TV tuners. I don't do a lot of overclocking, but I did try their auto overclocking feature, just to see how it did. Seemed to work OK, though it wanted to tune my 1600 memory down to 1333.

I personally wouldn't hesitate to try MSI again for a Haswell build.

(And, not that it's a motherboard, but I've been impressed with an MSI Twin Frozr 7850 I bought recently for an HTPC; it runs cool and extremely quiet.)
 
Tsumi said:
Buy based on the features you want. Any 1150 Z87 motherboard from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock that are at least $120 would be more than good enough.
Click to expand...

I tend to agree with this from what I've read. Asus and GB tend to support boards with bios updates longer in my experience, but I have a MSI Z77A-GD65 that works flawlessly on IB.
 
rumartinez89 said:
What do you guys think about the msi gaming series? Building a rig for a friend and he wants to keep the cost reasonable and will probably stick to one video card but wants the option of sli.

Also shopping at microcenter.
Click to expand...

i have an MSI Z77 - G65... excellent board. Its either MSI or Gigabyte for me personally.
 
rumartinez89 said:
I meant the msi g45 and g65 they are listed as available in the Rockville microcenter. The gigabyte board looks good and I do love my sniper m3
Click to expand...

I don't think the g45/gd65 are that much different other than a 3rd party controller for more SATA ports. 8 phase vs. 12 phase power, but it doesn't seem like more than 8 is going to make much of a difference.
 
Let's say I have no intention of overclocking an i5-4430, which is $190, 3.0GHz quad core if you weren't aware.

The cheapest Haswell motherboards I could find were the MSI B85M-P33 for $65, the ASRock B85M for $73, the ASUS B85M-G for $83, and Gigabyte doesn't seem to have released its B85 motherboards yet. Which way should I go here?
 
Again, buy based on the features you want, and the price. Maybe factor in layout and aesthetics. At that low end range, most things are pretty similar, and there will be minimal difference in reliability with no overclocking involved.
 
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