Help on mobo bottleneck question.

[HappyHimitsu]

Hey guys, happy to find this community.

I just put together a new pc with a vishera fx-8350 x8 with an evga superclock cooler, an evga gtx 580 3gb, 8 gigs of ddr3 and a Thermaltake SMART Series 750W ATX, all tied together on a cheap and crappy Biostar a960a3+ motherboard.

I am not getting near the performance I expected to see out of this build, and I am suspecting that my mobo may be the problem but I really don't know enough about motherboards to say one way or another. I can't overclock my Vishera at all really on this board, but I have heard that an FX-8350 should be able to get close to 5ghz without too much trouble with adequate cooling;
To even get from 4 to 4.5 I need to feed this thing 1.5V on the core.

I'm not really concerned about the overclocking, but in general it just doesn't seem to be giving me much oomph over my Phenom II 965 BE x4 @ 3.5 ghz.
Could my motherboard really pose that much of a problem, or do you all think it could be something else?

 

[Kmart1212]

Im actually very curious about this too, I think i might have the same problem. We will see when i get my new GPU

 

[setishock]

Why did you purchase a thoroughbred racehorse and put him in a shabby run down barn? Biostar are low end boards. It doesn't say one word about over clocking in the specs. A960A3+ :: Motherboard :: BIOSTAR
Find a board that brags about it over clocking ability.

 

[OhSnapWord]

I recommend the 990FX offerings from Asus or Gigabyte.

 

[HappyHimitsu]

Why did you purchase a thoroughbred racehorse and put him in a shabby run down barn? Biostar are low end boards. It doesn't say one word about over clocking in the specs. A960A3+ :: Motherboard :: BIOSTAR
Find a board that brags about it over clocking ability.

Again, I said in my post that I do not care about overclocking whatsoever at the moment. My question was whether or not my motherboard could bottleneck the rest of my system even at stock settings.

I recommend the 990FX offerings from Asus or Gigabyte.

While I appreciate the replies guys, neither of you have answered my question.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough so I apologize if that is the case.
I would just like to know if having such a shabby motherboard has dropped the bar really low in terms of the performance that my CPU and GPU should be able to obtain. I'm not worried about whether or not I can overclock so much, but even at stock volts I am not running where I believe I should be.

Hopefully somebody with a bit more knowledge can tell me if indeed this motherboard is holding me back.

 

[ja6on]

yes that board has an old chipset, you need the 990x or 990fx for that CPU.
the north and south bridges would be quite slow in that board.(this is the communication part of the board)

 

[HappyHimitsu]

yes that board has an old chipset, you need the 990x or 990fx for that CPU.
the north and south bridges would be quite slow in that board.(this is the communication part of the board)

Thanks ja6on (that's my name too lol); Considering the board was native AM3 and it was retrofitted to AM3+ with a bios update I was thinking it would probably be the issue. I only ordered it due to budget constraints on this build and I was hoping I might get lucky.
I just put in my order for the ASRock 990FX Extreme4 so I will let you all know in a week or two how it goes!

 

[HappyHimitsu]

Just and edit on my last post (why can't you edit posts on this forum?).
The Biostar Mobo is AM3+ ootb, not AM3 as I previously stated. It did need a bios update to support the octocores though.

 

[setishock]

I did answer your question and commented on your over clock statement. I guess my Doctor McCoy metaphor was lost on you.

I've seen a trend lately of people coming in and asking why doesn't this work or work right. When shopping for parts for a DIY build you have to check the compatibility of each and every little part that will make up the system. Any one weak link will affect the over all performance of the system.
The big question you face when putting together a computer is, Will all of the parts play well together? In your case it appears that is not so. You say the mother board is cheap and crappy. The answer to your question is staring you in the face. We were, simply put, agreeing with you. And OhSnapWord was suggesting a couple of boards that would do better than the one you are frustrated with now.
"sigh" Something you might want to try is getting the mother board drivers latest version. That's the drivers for the chip set. Find what brand and model they are then go get the drivers and install them. Might help, might not. Won't hurt to try...

 

[HappyHimitsu]

I did answer your question and commented on your over clock statement. I guess my Doctor McCoy metaphor was lost on you.

I've seen a trend lately of people coming in and asking why doesn't this work or work right. When shopping for parts for a DIY build you have to check the compatibility of each and every little part that will make up the system. Any one weak link will affect the over all performance of the system.
The big question you face when putting together a computer is, Will all of the parts play well together? In your case it appears that is not so. You say the mother board is cheap and crappy. The answer to your question is staring you in the face. We were, simply put, agreeing with you. And OhSnapWord was suggesting a couple of boards that would do better than the one you are frustrated with now.
"sigh" Something you might want to try is getting the mother board drivers latest version. That's the drivers for the chip set. Find what brand and model they are then go get the drivers and install them. Might help, might not. Won't hurt to try...

I understood your metaphor just fine, but it did nothing to tell me whether or not my motherboard was a bottleneck; all you did was confirm that it's a piece of crap.
I wasn't asking you whether or not my sentiments about my motherboard being crappy were correct, I was asking you whether or not it could be the reason I am getting sub-par performance with my particular system.

This is far from my first build, but I know very little about motherboards and the general consensus seems to be that many believe unless your living in 1993 your motherboard will not bottleneck your system; I haven't been getting the performance that I believe that I should be getting on my FX-8350 so I was hoping that somebody here could help me with that, and ja6on did; but I appreciate you trying to help nonetheless.

Respect deserves respect and I wasn't rude or arrogant to you in the least,
I even thanked you for your reply; but the fact remains, you did not answer my question so I simply told you such and thanked you for your efforts.

Again, if you were genuinely trying to help, I tip my hat to you Sir. Thank you kindly for your efforts and may you have a great evening.

Adieu.