ASRock 970DE3/U3S3 AM3+ AMD 770 + SB710 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Very nice board with USB 3.0. I have built 5 of these for gaming machines coupled with the AMD 965BE bargain processor and they have all worked out perfect. Gskill ripjaw has been very compatible with this board as well for reasonable ram and a very reasonable build cost. Stick a good video card with it and for the money this setup cannot be beat.

Cons: none

Overall Review: I fear the day when this board will no longer be available as it has been around for a while now. I am thinking about stockpiling a few more of these and 965BE chips since for a gamer, these are better than the new AMD chips since you will want to run a dedicated video care anyway and for so much processor for so little money, this setup cannot be beat. My HTPC in the living room with the AMD 965 and the same video card as my computer room i7 that is over clocked to 4Ghz run within 1fps on games. Of course, for video conversion or photo shop the i7 wins hands down over the amd processor, but for gaming, there is no reason to pay the premium for an i7, or even an i5 for that matter. The AMD is no slouch at video conversion, but for gaming there is no reason to go Intel, unless you have more money than you know what to do with. Piece a couple of systems together and see for yourself, you can save a couple of hundred dollars over the Intel chips and have the same gaming performance. It's a no brainer.

Pros: IDE support, Floppy drive support, 6Gb/s SATA drive support, wonderful overclocking support, fast DDR3 memory support, AM3+ socket support, nice component placement and size

Cons: I suppose I would have liked another IDE controller for my old DVD drives

Overall Review: There is literally no other motherboard like this available today. This is a modern and feature rich full size motherboard with up to date technology support and high speed performance. I coupled this with an AMD "Black" edition FX-4100 AM3+ processor and this thing is literally incredible! It flies and yet I have only begun to explore all that it can do! This board allowed me to use most of my old drives and GPX card while at the same time allowing me the most recent technology in bus speeds, ram speed and processors speeds. I have overclocked this processor 20% including increasing DDR3 RAM clocking. Then I ran CPU stress tests to check out the stability of the CPU. There was no problem at all! WOW Buy this before it is no longer in production! If anyone has any questions for me email at pcm_man@yahoo.com Thanks!

Pros: solid cost effective quality components nice bios easy overclocking stable

Cons: sata 3 on the ASmedia controller is still unstable if used for boot drives.

Overall Review: i havn't had a single issue with this board since i've burchased it. it has been running 24/7 besides a power outage and a few restarts after installing programs and such. the cpu is stable @ 5.12ghz with a little voltage increase and a corsair h100 cooler. i have since purchased 2x 120gb ssd's which have run flawlessly in raid 0 on the 2x sata 3 ports. buy it

Pros: AM3+, USB 3, SATA 6GB/s, lots of fan headers (the real reason I picked this board)

Cons: There were several minor nuisances when I built this board that aren't really worth taking off an egg, but I really thought about it. It was narrower than any board I've ever used before, so I had to move all my standoffs. Also, the PCI slot was lower than usual, so I had to pull out another slot cover thingy. Neither a big deal, but a little annoying. I frequently have trouble fitting the I/O shield, but this was the worst in all my years of building. In the end, I had to break off all the spring pin things entirely to get it to fit flush enough to align the motherboard holes with the standoffs. But mostly, with the BIOS version it shipped with (1.40) it took a long time to boot (about 30-40 seconds, 15 of which were before the splash screen, convincing me it wasn't going to boot) and would fail to recover from hibernate. I flashed the newest BIOS (1.60) and all those problems seem to be resolved, so I didn't take off any eggs for that.

Pros: This board is overall good. Everything I could ask for at the right price.

Cons: SATA ports are a little flimsy. I noticed this on my other more expensive ASRock board aswell. However, I dont plan on bashing them around to often to matter that much.

Overall Review: Bought this board for doing a budget build for my mothers christmas present. Ended up going a little overboard and threw in 16GB of RAM, a SSD, and a decent graphics card. All in all this board has more options than she will ever use im sure.

Pros: Good specs for the price

Cons: 2 SATA connections fell off of the motherboard when connecting a Sata drive. THEY ACTUALLY FELL OFF!

Overall Review: The SATA connections fell off so easily, makes me wonder how many other parts are held on with spit and scotch tape.

Pros: budget board with a ton of features not usually found in this price range.

Cons: to bad it doesn't have a better nb and sb or support higher speed memory.

Overall Review: Another reviewer said it doesnt support cpu's above 95w. Thats a lie just go to their website and it clearly stated in the cpu section that it supports cpu's up to 140w. here's a copy pate from their site. - Support for Socket AM3+ processors - Support for Socket AM3 processors: AMD Phenom™ II X6 / X4 / X3 / X2 (except 920 / 940) / Athlon II X4 / X3 / X2 / Sempron processors - Supports 8-Core CPU - Digi Power Design - Supports CPU up to 140W - Supports AMD OverDrive™ with ACC feature (Advanced Clock Calibration) - Supports AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet Technology - FSB 2600 MHz (5.2 GT/s) - Supports Untied Overclocking Technology - Supports Hyper-Transport 3.0 (HT 3.0) Technology

Pros: Pros for me are the following: Supports FX8120 8 Core Takes up to 32 gigs of DDR3 Ram Has the new SATA 6gbs connectors Low Power and easy to overclock if needed.

Cons: Would be nice to have the uEFI in it about now, but no biggy. I think it actually does (how the bios is updated), but need more info on it.

Overall Review: This is used as a development hypervisor with 2 Windows VMs and 6 Linux LXC containers. The OS is Gentoo Linux, with different development projects like Android on it. Been a solid workhorse for me. I see complaints about the condition of the board, but I didn't even take notice as I see to many mainboards to really care at this time. The Bios hasn't been updated since I got it, running p1.0. Will be updating that shortly.