Motherboard for AM2/AM3/AM3+ build - 2010 PC experiment

keke

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I am considering to build an AMD powered 2010ish PC, as I have a bunch of CPUs (including Phenom 980 and Phenom 1100T).

Any advice on a good motherboard that supports Athlon 64 X2 AM2 CPUs - up to Athlon X2 6400+, and Phenom X4 and X6?

Maybe to also have support for FX-8370 (or FX-9590), if such mobo exists?
 
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some would ask why bother to build an AMD based machine for 2010ish period :)

I have been an AMD enthusiast for more than 10 years, up to 2006, when I switched to Intel CPUs (Q6600 and then i7-4770k and a few Xeons after), and only this year returning to AMD Ryzen 9 3900x :)

so I miss the less shiny / exciting years AMD had - hence building an 2005 machine with AMD Socket 939 (Athlon 64 X2 based), and a 2010 one including Phenoms X4 and X6, and hopefully an FX-8370 (as FX-9590 is a different beast)

Call it nostalgia for crappy AMD years ;)
 
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hence the explanation

some were not so bad, and with a good mobo supporting am2/am3/am3+ you can cover a wide rance of AMD CPUs for comparisons

I also have a bunch of the CPUs, and feel the itch to see it at work - as bad as they were
 
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Asus M4A78T. Still have one in use, 24/7 since... well, 2009 or so. You can still find them.
 
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Mine's an old PhenomII. Was my workstation, then plex server, now it's a backup NAS. Just won't die.
 
hence the explanation

some were not so bad, and with a good mobo supporting am2/am3/am3+ you can cover a wide rance of AMD CPUs for comparisons

I also have a bunch of the CPUs, and feel the itch to see it at work - as bad as they were

Nope. Everything after the Athlon X2 was bad compared to their Intel counterparts. Everything from Phenom, Phenom II, through all the Bulldozer variants were basically outclassed by a longshot. The only reason why any of those sold is because they were marked down to bargain basement pricing and there were lots of people with motherboards that could be upgraded to those CPU's. Unless you had a chip on your shoulder against Intel or were on an extreme budget, no one bought those CPU's if they had done their research and cared about performance.
 
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Get something with a 990 chipset. The 970 mobo's were terrible for weak VRMS that would make the mobo throttle the cpu if you tried to OC or use anything more than a 6 core chip. All the mobos were cheap crap though. That generations job was to be cheap.
 
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Get something with a 990 chipset. The 970 mobo's were terrible for weak VRMS that would make the mobo throttle the cpu if you tried to OC or use anything more than a 6 core chip. All the mobos were cheap crap though. That generations job was to be cheap.
Thanks travm, the quest to build the 'crappy athlon X2/athlon II/Phenom X2/X4/X6 machine' is on :)
 
Thanks travm, the quest to build the 'crappy athlon X2/athlon II/Phenom X2/X4/X6 machine' is on :)
I'm not sure the 990 chipsets supported the old Athlon/phenom. You might have to back up to the 800 series, but they didn't support the fx CPUs. I have a couple of these boxes in my house, they still work really well for most purposes, despite "but Intel is faster".
 
I'm not sure the 990 chipsets supported the old Athlon/phenom. You might have to back up to the 800 series, but they didn't support the fx CPUs. I have a couple of these boxes in my house, they still work really well for most purposes, despite "but Intel is faster".
Think you are right, I got one ASUS M4A79 Deluxe with 790FX chipset so far, so that will get me started.

Will look for a 970FX chipset mobo for the FX flavours.
 
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Think you are right, I got one ASUS M4A79 Deluxe with 780FX chipset so far, so that will get me started.

Will look for a 970FX chipset mobo for the FX flavours.
Suggest again you stay away from the 970 boards, go 990.
 
Nope. Everything after the Athlon X2 was bad compared to their Intel counterparts. Everything from Phenom, Phenom II, through all the Bulldozer variants were basically outclassed by a longshot. The only reason why any of those sold is because they were marked down to bargain basement pricing and there were lots of people with motherboards that could be upgraded to those CPU's. Unless you had a chip on your shoulder against AMD or were on an extreme budget, no one bought those CPU's if they had done their research and cared about performance.
This. Everyone who bought these CPUs didn't do any research before they bought them.
 
This. Everyone who bought these CPUs didn't do any research before they bought them.

Back in those days we reviewed a couple boards along side the CPU's when new ones would launch, but that was generally it. We didn't waste our time reviewing hardware enthusiasts didn't want to buy or weren't all that interested in reading about. That's how bad they were relative to Intel. We almost always had an AMD CPU in the benchmark lineup in all our CPU and motherboard reviews. It was at the bottom of every chart every time.
 
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This. Everyone who bought these CPUs didn't do any research before they bought them.
I did lots of research, still using an fx6350, works great. Have an X3 b53 OEM chip unlocked the fourth core. It cost me $35. These chips were an amazing value.
 
sorry, typo from my side, 990 will be ;)
Just avoid gigabyte 990 boards - those were infamous for being REALLY REALLY bad (990FX-UD3 especially). I've got one sitting here. My plan is to take a dump on it and light it on fire. I'd send it to you, but... you don't want it. You REALLY don't want it.
This. Everyone who bought these CPUs didn't do any research before they bought them.
Eh. You could get them cheap as hell - if performance wasn't a requirement, or significant, they were cheap. I did that for both of the ones I had. Also had something that needed to see 8 real threads - 8350FX did that perfectly, and cheaply.
I did lots of research, still using an fx6350, works great. Have an X3 b53 OEM chip unlocked the fourth core. It cost me $35. These chips were an amazing value.
Bingo. Just doing office apps? Will do the job just fine. Even light gaming was fine. Real work? Get intel. Used an 8350 for a workstation from 2014 till 2017, built on the cheap, then wife used it as a gaming system for a bit.
 
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Back in those days we reviewed a couple boards along side the CPU's when new ones would launch, but that was generally it. We didn't waste our time reviewing hardware enthusiasts didn't want to buy or weren't all that interested in reading about. That's how bad they were relative to Intel. We almost always had an AMD CPU in the benchmark lineup in all our CPU and motherboard reviews. It was at the bottom of every chart every time.
Yeah, I also went for Intel CPUs from 2006 onwards, for similar reasons.
 
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Bingo. Just doing office apps? Will do the job just fine. Even light gaming was fine. Real work? Get intel. Used an 8350 for a workstation from 2014 till 2017, built on the cheap, then wife used it as a gaming system for a bit.

Indeed, 2 Intel CPUs served me fine for intensive pentest work for those years, plus security assessmnet for virtualised solutions. I did stay away from excel work, that is deadly ;)
 
Just avoid gigabyte 990 boards - those were infamous for being REALLY REALLY bad (990FX-UD3 especially). I've got one sitting here. My plan is to take a dump on it and light it on fire. I'd send it to you, but... you don't want it. You REALLY don't want it.

Eh. You could get them cheap as hell - if performance wasn't a requirement, or significant, they were cheap. I did that for both of the ones I had. Also had something that needed to see 8 real threads - 8350FX did that perfectly, and cheaply.

Bingo. Just doing office apps? Will do the job just fine. Even light gaming was fine. Real work? Get intel. Used an 8350 for a workstation from 2014 till 2017, built on the cheap, then wife used it as a gaming system for a bit.

That's what I'm talking about. Everyone here who chimed in about owning one of these primarily cited price as their reason for going AMD. No one did so because they wanted the best performing CPU's of the day. If you did, you went Intel. People who bought AMD CPU's back then did so for one of five reasons:
  • You had an existing AMD processor compatible motherboard, and overall cost of an upgrade was factored in making the upgrade attractive.
  • You bought the CPU because it was priced at bargain bin prices.
  • You didn't care about the performance beyond it being better than what you had at the time.
  • You didn't do any research and bought them day one, while reviews were coming out. (Stood in line at Microcenter on launch day, etc.)
  • You had an absolute hatred for Intel and refused to buy them for XYZ reason.
Or any combination of those factors. What you didn't do was buy an AMD CPU if you wanted the best performance money could buy in a segment and could afford the cost jump to Intel. That's why I don't get the OP's nostalgia for an era in AMD's history where its products were almost the laughing stock of the industry. Year after year, AMD released more and more products that significantly trailed its competition and even sometimes their own products. You don't sign up for that unless pricing is at rock bottom.

As for the GIGABYTE 990FX motherboards, my review of the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 (If I recall correctly) was so bad that I got a call from GIGABYTE begging me to take the review down. I directed the rep to Kyle, who told the rep to "get bent" or something to that effect. That being said, all of the 990FX chipset based boards were terrible. They were initially released before Bulldozer CPU's were launched. You know, the very CPU the boards were designed for. With all the legacy microcode in them for older CPU's, their firmware was a disaster with anything but Bulldozer. It was so bad that we just stopped reviewing AMD compatible boards entirely at that point.
 
Don't forget the MOAR COARZ hype train. I was at the tail end of working at a job consisting of residential repairs and retail custom builds when bulldozer launched.

I would talk to 10 people who insisted on MOAR COR3Z for every 1 person who wanted an i5 or i7. At first I tried to educate customers, show them benchmarks, etc. Those people where fiercely stubborn (or stupid) and I got nothing out of it, so eventually I gave up and just sold 6 and 8 core bulldozer builds out the wazoo. It just wasn't worth hassle to tell them different.
 
Don't forget the MOAR COARZ hype train. I was at the tail end of working at a job consisting of residential repairs and retail custom builds when bulldozer launched.

I would talk to 10 people who insisted on MOAR COR3Z for every 1 person who wanted an i5 or i7. At first I tried to educate customers, show them benchmarks, etc. Those people where fiercely stubborn (or stupid) and I got nothing out of it, so eventually I gave up and just sold 6 and 8 core bulldozer builds out the wazoo. It just wasn't worth hassle to tell them different.

I've never encountered those people. I was long since out of retail by the time multicore CPU's came around. I also don't recall ever even hearing those people at Microcenter. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that the only reason why Product A is more expensive than Product B is because the company that makes Product A is greedy. Many people were probably convinced that moar is better and it's cheaper. Had the AMD Bulldozer CPU's cost more, they probably wouldn't have bought as many. I still maintain that price was always the primary appeal of everything AMD sold from Phenom through Bulldozer. People are great at justifying anything to themselves but I still think that was the primary reason, no matter what they say in retrospect.

I understand this to an extent. The fact is, I want 16 cores in my desktop because 16 core CPU's are available even though I don't do anything that would take advantage of it. I wanted a 5950X. Ultimately, I opted for the 10900K. It's functionally just as fast as AMD at 4K gaming and more importantly, it was available. Still, I always want moar cores even when no logic in the world would justify it. Hell, when I bought my 3950X I wanted a 3960X or 3970X, I just wasn't willing to pay for it. Again, I had no real reason to buy either of those CPU's as I don't do anything that would require the platform or justify the expense. $1,000 is pretty much my limit for a CPU as I'm not willing to spend more than that. The 3960X and 3970X were just way too far outside of that.
 
I did my research and bought an Athlon II x250. It easily beat the equivalent Intel E5200.

AMD didn't have an answer to the i7 but their low end and mid range CPUs were solid. Phenom II was a bit stronger offering than Phenom and Bulldozer though.

I'd love to have a FX-9590 system. I think that CPU will be highly collectible.
 
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I did my research and bought an Athlon II x250. It easily beat the equivalent Intel E5200.

AMD didn't have an answer to the i7 but their low end and mid range CPUs were solid. Phenom II was a bit stronger offering than Phenom and Bulldozer though.

I'd love to have a FX-9590 system. I think that CPU will be highly collectible.
Unfortunately I'm sure all the 9590s have burnt up by now. 220w lol
 
I have a Crosshair 3 running an 8350, just turned off and stored about June 2020. It should support a lot of what you are asking.
 
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It's amazing to me that the moment you mention AMD FX anywhere on the internet, people still need to chime in with their opinions, on a 10+ year old platform, as if it hasn't all been said before


OP, might want to consider finding a Sabertooth 990FX
 
It's amazing to me that the moment you mention AMD FX anywhere on the internet, people still need to chime in with their opinions, on a 10+ year old platform, as if it hasn't all been said before


OP, might want to consider finding a Sabertooth 990FX
Sabertooth 990FX addedd to the wish list, finding one at a reasonable price is the next step ;)
 
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Sabertoot 990FX - seems to have some problem with the analogue sound output. Any tips/advice on fixing that?
 
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None of those worked great. Weird feedback and stuff. I had the same problem with one of my other boards from that gen.
 
OP, might want to consider finding a Sabertooth 990FX
I had two of those. The first one died after 4 years. The second one was the then-new R3.0, which added an NVME slot and USB 3. I don't own that one anymore, but the new owner is still using it every day. It's a good board (aside from the early death of the first one). I don't recall having any analogue audio problems.
 
I never had sound problems with mine, but I haven't used sound on that board in a few years so can't really say for sure

I have the Rev 1.0 and it's rock solid until today
 
I'm not sure the 990 chipsets supported the old Athlon/phenom. You might have to back up to the 800 series, but they didn't support the fx CPUs.
The 990X supported all AM3+ Athlon/Phenom CPU's but not AM2/+. https://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-AMD_(chipsets)/990X.html

And I know for a fact that the 880's and the 890's supported FX chips, because I'm typing on my server that has a Asrock 880GM-LE FX with a FX6300.
 
And I know for a fact that the 880's and the 890's supported FX chips, because I'm typing on my server that has a Asrock 880GM-LE FX with a FX6300.
Good to know, quick wiki search doesn't seem to confirm this though. 8XX chipsets were AM3, not AM3+ according to Wikipedia. More research may be necessary.
 
to stay true to my goal for a powerful AMD 2010 machine (as powerful as it can get, of course - call it 2010 AMD Dream Machine), cannot touch the FX-8370 or FX-9590 CPUs in this project (2014, respectively 2013).

So, getting close to settling for ASUS M4A79 Deluxe with 790FX chipset.

CPUs to be included for this build:
- 2-3 AM2 CPUs, including Athlon 64 X2 6400+
- plan to include an AM2 4800+ as well, to compare it later with the 2005ish build based on S939
- maybe some Athlon II flavoured CPUs at some stage
- Phenom II X4 980 - in the post
- Phenom II X6 1100T - in the post

video card: EVGA GTX 580 3GB
RAM - tbc

Thank you for all the help and advice provided - now the seeds for a later FX-9590 build are planted :)
 
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It came to me as an aftertought - I think I will I need a second mobo for this build/experiment, one that supports SLI.

Any suggestions for a reliable AM2/AM3/AM3+ motherboard with SLI support?
 
I've never encountered those people. I was long since out of retail by the time multicore CPU's came around. I also don't recall ever even hearing those people at Microcenter. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that the only reason why Product A is more expensive than Product B is because the company that makes Product A is greedy. Many people were probably convinced that moar is better and it's cheaper. Had the AMD Bulldozer CPU's cost more, they probably wouldn't have bought as many. I still maintain that price was always the primary appeal of everything AMD sold from Phenom through Bulldozer. People are great at justifying anything to themselves but I still think that was the primary reason, no matter what they say in retrospect.

I understand this to an extent. The fact is, I want 16 cores in my desktop because 16 core CPU's are available even though I don't do anything that would take advantage of it. I wanted a 5950X. Ultimately, I opted for the 10900K. It's functionally just as fast as AMD at 4K gaming and more importantly, it was available. Still, I always want moar cores even when no logic in the world would justify it. Hell, when I bought my 3950X I wanted a 3960X or 3970X, I just wasn't willing to pay for it. Again, I had no real reason to buy either of those CPU's as I don't do anything that would require the platform or justify the expense. $1,000 is pretty much my limit for a CPU as I'm not willing to spend more than that. The 3960X and 3970X were just way too far outside of that.
If you have the money I understand buying more than you need. Back when I was in college on a tight budget I bought the dual core as opposed to the Q6600 (or other 4 core CPU) because I mostly used my PC for gaming. By the time most games started supporting 4 cores the Q6600 was showing its age and I upgraded to a sandy CPU at that time.

On another note I sold a repaired 8350 for 125 bucks recently, I was thinking to myself, what idiot would pay $125 for this garbage CPU?
 
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