ASRock Micro ATX DDR3 1066 Motherboards 970M PRO3

This board replaced a MSi 890 micro with an IGP. The 970M's processor is in the EXACT same place, so my cpu heat sink lined up with the top case opening. I use a 3 hard drive switch in a rear PCI slot to power off the OS I am not using. Now I can dual boot 7 and 10 without any blue screen.This board supports OS are XP to Win10 and Linux. It might even work for a cash register.I can OC this board, and it runs cool, with no locks or blue screens. But OC caused the BIOs to get flakey over time. After a year and a half and several BIOs resets. I went back to the Optimized defaults, for Windows 7 and 10. I left C6, and Cool and Quiet enabled. I used default/auto for most everything else. My particular DIMMS did need manual settings 9-9-9-24-39 though. I left C1E off.Since doing so, the 970M delivers ROCK STABLE operation. Day in, day out!My 8320E beginning clock is 3.2 and Turbo to 3.5, so the default clocks have enough power for light gaming and editing tools.Idle temps for core, VRM and NB less than 40C. Full load, less than 55C. I use process Lasso to switch power schemes by Idlesaver feature. The CPU and Sys Fans can be controlled by Speedfan, but you must dilly dally with the advance tab in the config of Speedfan to make it work.If you OC and it cracks up the BIOs, it can look like hardware failed. Don't panic. Do Reset CMOS. (unplug, remove battery, push power button several times, then move jumper right then back left). It may need patience, sometimes stalls after f10, push any button. It may even need F8 to get back to desktop, but once it does, it and Windows are rock stable again.I reused a Windows install, and the 10MB LAN software that you unzip on a flash drive was useful. You can go to bios and install it, so your LAN is connected for Windows Update help GPU software. I put ASRock all in one drivers on flash drive, GPU Disc in optical drive and my system hobbled to the desktop and straightened itself out after a couple of reboots. The chipset software installed itself but I had to start GPU setup. I used Autoruns to clean up old drivers.

I purchased this board about a month ago to replace an Asus board I was having difficulties with. The Asus board could not supply enough power to the FX-6300 in my system while under load, and still had no headroom whatsoever at the stock speed. It was limited to 95 watts, the base requirement for the 6300, and would crash in any intensive games. Seeing that this board could supply 140 watts, enough for a turbo boost to 4.1-4.3 ghz, I decided to purchase it. For a month, it worked fine. Then, I started experiencing the same problems as with the previous board. In Star Wars Battlefront, the pc would crash after just 5 minutes (turbo boost disabled, cpu at stock speed). Further research indicated that the 4+1 phase power connector used by this board is a poor fit for a performance cpu like the 6300, and very few people have ever had any success with this board and the FX-6300. I am currently in the process of looking for yet another replacement. As far as the board goes in general, it will probably work fine with FX-6300 that is underclocked or just being used for light tasks and games like minecraft or TF2. With that being said, I fail to see why someone would get an FX-6300 for casual tasks, so while this is the best micro-atx board for the am3+ platform, I would not advise getting this unless you have a low-tier FX processor or an older, less demanding cpu with lower power requirements. If you are looking to build a first-time budget gaming rig with the FX-6300, I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have to get a more expensive motherboard, and those boards are all atx, and cost at least 100 US dollars. Otherwise, you'll just end up unnecessarily spending more money replacing it.UPDATE------I have recently discovered that the aforementioned crashes were in fact due to the graphics card overheating, which was caused by my own poor arrangement of case fans. With that in mind, I once again tried tweaking the cpu settings, and, with this board, I achieved a stable 4.3 ghz clockspeed on my Fx-6300. Temperatures remained perfectly stable (on the stock cooler, I might add), and I found that I could go for several hours of gaming, and I even sucessfully tried a shirt run at 4.5 ghz. After a bit of troubleshooting, I am happy to say that my prevoius issues were resultant of my own error and forgetfulness of simple thermal physics.

I damaged my motherboard , but I wasn't ready to dump the money needed to bring me upto date with current CPU/GPU gen. technology. This ASRock motherboard for AM3+ socketCPUs and DDR3 memory capabilities was a solid alternative option at an affordable price