Need help choosing Z97 budget Motherboard

HyeVltg3 · 2 Mar 2016 at 22:26

I'm Canadian, yes I know, weird why am I posting on the UK forums. Mainly looking for insight before I buy, made a ton of mistakes on my previous Z77 build and regret not asking for opinions.
Calling these Budget Motherboards because the fit under my budget of $200cad (£106)

- GIGABYTE GA-Z97-HD3 (rev. 2.0) - $145 (£77)
- ASUS Z97-K/CSM - $160 (£85)
- GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z97X-Gaming 3 - $180 (£96)
- ASUS Z97-PRO GAMER -$205 (£109)

CPU: i7-4790K
RAM: G.Skill 32GB DDR3-2400
GPU: R9 390 (want the option to go SLI/CF when Dx12 hits)
HDD: 4xHDD 2xSSD
PSU: Corsair AX850
OS: Win10

If anyone has better options please share, finding a decently priced mobo that can do 2-way and 6xSATA3 is hard.

Side Q: When certain motherboards say SATA Express in the last two SATA3 ports, can I still plug in SATA3 SSD/HDDs? or does that essentially mean 4xSATA3,2xSATA.E ?

Borealis · 2 Mar 2016 at 22:45

The Asus Pro-Gamer is supposed to be very good. I'd go with either that or the Gigabyte G1 Gaming.

The second PCI-E x16 slot on the Z97-HD3 and the Z97-K/CSM only runs at x4, so forget that if you want SLI. It will support Crossfire, but performance won't be great.

If you need 6 SATA ports, then the Gigabyte G1 Gaming is the one you want out of those 4, it's the only one with 6. Be aware that if you install an M.2. drive or a SATA.E device, it disables the 5th/6th SATA ports.

HyeVltg3 · 3 Mar 2016 at 00:50

Gigabyte G1 Gaming
Asus Pro-Gamer
MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition

With some more digging These 3 fit my budget nicely, they check all the boxes and so does
ASRock Z97 Extreme3

But I dont know much about ASRock.
And like the rest, newegg has some scary 1/5 rated reviews about DOAs and failings after a few months (not ASRock, I'm talking about all 4 mobos)
Either only the people having problems are complaining and the rest 80-90% are perfectly fine or they actually do have a high failure rate.
I dont remember seeing this many bad reviews about my Asus Sabertooth Z77.
Just putting a budget on things as I spent $280 (£149) on the Sabertooth, and I feel like I spent way too much for the little I needed. hence my low budget this time around.

EDIT:
My only experience is with the Asus motherboard. Just read that the Z97 board aside from Asus dont out-of-the-box support the Haswell Refresh CPU, is this true? dont all mobos have USB-Flash Bios these days?

Borealis · 3 Mar 2016 at 07:51

As is quite common, people tend to leave reviews and comments when something goes wrong rather than giving positive feedback.

Any board can arrive DOA. It's not common at all, but it does happen. I've only had it once in 10 years of PC building.

Asrock do make some decent stuff now. The Extreme 3 does support SLI and has 6 SATA connectors. The Asus Pro-Gamer only has 4 physical SATA ports, so unless you added in a SATA expansion card, it doesn't have enough ports for your 4xHDDs and 2xSSDs.

The MSI board also has 6 SATA ports and supports SLI, so you've got a choice between either the Gigabyte, Asrock or MSI board.

The Z97 chipset was released specifically for Haswell Refresh. The Asrock and MSI will support a 4790K out of the box according to the manufacturers' CPU support list and the Gigabyte supports it from BIOS F5, potentially the board could come with BIOS F3.

All modern boards can flash the BIOS from USB, correct but if the CPU isn't supported, you could get stuck.

marc2003 · 3 Mar 2016 at 09:56

Asus boards let you flash without a CPU installed. However, it shouldn't be an issue because Z97 really does support all haswell refresh/devil's canyon processors.

If using ethernet connection to your router, I'd avoid any board that has that "killer" lan nonsense. You really want Intel lan or even realtek would do.

Borealis · 3 Mar 2016 at 10:34

I agree that Z97 supports all refresh/DC CPUs (it was the whole point of Z97), but for some stupid reason there are early BIOSes available for some boards that don't support all of the chips. It's probably down to the fact that the Z97 boards hit the market before the refreshed CPUs arrived (I think). Why Gigabyte still list the early BIOS on their support pages for the G1 Gaming I don't know. I'd be surprised if a new board came shipped with the old BIOS, unless it was very old stock.

The MSI uses Realtek LAN, the Asrock has Intel LAN. I haven't had any problems with the Killer LAN on my board so far.

HyeVltg3 · 3 Mar 2016 at 20:11

geez...note to self, refresh page if I'm going to leave the tab open.Token expired, lost everything I was typing when I hit Post.

Paraphrasing:

Thanks all for their inputs.
Settled on the MSI MSI Gaming Z97 GAMING 5
Has everything I need. nicely priced too.

Going to go ask on the MSI forums if I can flash bios without needing the CPU plugged in, like Asus boards.
Since most likely ALL the people complaining about not POSTing in this board on first boot seem to all have Haswell Refreshs CPUs.

Side-Q: I know this is Hardware, but do I need to reinstall Win10 (should I start making backups now) or can I just replace Mobo+CPU, install drives and then be able to just boot into my current Win10 to install drivers...?

Borealis · 3 Mar 2016 at 21:02

It would be best to reinstall windows if you're going from Z77 to Z97. You can only swap boards without issues if you're replacing like for like - e.g. you replaced a Z97 board with another Z97 board. Otherwise the chipset drivers etc can get screwed up and Windows complains...

Whilst it would probably boot, you are likely to have problems.

HyeVltg3 · 3 Mar 2016 at 22:12

Borealis said:
It would be best to reinstall windows if you're going from Z77 to Z97. You can only swap boards without issues if you're replacing like for like - e.g. you replaced a Z97 board with another Z97 board. Otherwise the chipset drivers etc can get screwed up and Windows complains...

Whilst it would probably boot, you are likely to have problems.

Assumed as much. really feeling like going back to Win7, Win10 is just a PIA, looks great, but if I check my Event Viewer, so many errors of things not running, driver issues, I'm surprised I havent gotten any BSODs. the Asus Sabertooth Z77 doesnt even have (labled) Win10 drivers, just goes up to Win8.1 which work on Win10...but I'm sure certain incompatibilities exist, probably why I have

...yup.

Well either way, seems I'm good on the MSI bios issue, looks like theres a new batch of pre-updated bios boards floating around so all the "cant POST" issues were from Launch batches of the MSI board.
Just glad to be upgrading...sort of, Was really disappointed with Skylake, and its really expensive for not much of an upgrade. so Haswell till AMD Zen seemed better.