Sandy mobo recommendation

[wevsspot]

Honestly, any of the three boards you've listed would be a great choice. Pick the one that meets or beats your budget target and gives you the most amount of features for the money. We all have one (or maybe more negative things to say about one m/b manufacturer or another), but in reality that is based on a bad experience somewhere along the line. I swore off MSI motherboards back in the socket A and 754 days because of constantly burning BIOS chips that never seemed to recover without replacing the chip. But I've been running a MSI x58 Big Bang board for almost a year now (kept it instead of an Asus P6X58D Deluxe board that I had been running) and I've been very pleased. I've also used Gigabyte and ASRock boards. Every single one of them had their quirks, but they had their strong points too.

 

Another thing to consider is the board layout and what type of peripherals you need to install. Say you have a PCIe x1 sound card, then placement of the x1 slot in relationship to the PCIe x8 slots might become an issue if you're using a dual slot vga card(s). Or maybe you want to install a hunking air cooler and there are clearance problems due to RAM slot placement or other crowding around the CPU socket. You get the idea.

[AMG]

Well I'm having a sound card but don't know about the interface As yet got a choice between xonar DX like I have now or a DG. The UD4 has a slightly weird layout considering I'm may land up with a DC2 from asus that's a tri slot cooler But I'm water oolong so it won't be for long