Something awful happened and you can no longer wait for Zen to arrive; you need a low cost motherboard and chip ASAP. Your memory, storage and PSU are all good, you just need something to plug them into and you really don't want to spend a lot upgrading with new silicon just around the corner. Alternatively, perhaps you have some components lying around and need a system capable of basic tasks and again, you don't want to spend a lot to get it up and running.
The BioStar A68N-5200 eTeknix just tested might just be what you need, up to 16GB DDR3, a single PCIe 16x slot, a pair of SATA 6.0Gb/s slots, two USB 3.0 slots and four USB 2.0 along with other connectors and an quad-core A6-5200 with HD8400 graphics onboard. You won't win any benchmarking contests but it is a decent start for $60.
"Despite a lot of the media focus being on Kaby Lake and AMD’s fabled Zen architecture, it’s important to remember that some users require a new motherboard as a matter of urgency and cannot wait for upcoming solutions. Not only that, in low-end scenarios such as a home office system or HTPC, modern processors provide more than enough performance."
Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:
Motherboards
- ASRock X99 Taichi @ Kitguru
- MSI X99A Tomahawk @ Kitguru
- GIGABYTE Z170X-UD5 TH Motherboard Review @ Hardware Canucks
Or you can buy an ASUS AM1
Or you can buy an ASUS AM1 motherboard that permits overclocking and an Athlon 5350 for about the same cost.
Biostar is really slow with it’s PRs/products. I mean, they just announced their GTX 1060’s.
Or.. you can just get a
Or.. you can just get a decent fucking intel/nvidia set-up and save yourself headaches, hassles, RMA’s, bullshit broken drivers,firmware, etc.
Why poor ass people like cheap shit is beyond me. Fucking dumb.
ya, cause a pfsense box needs
ya, cause a pfsense box needs a xeon and a titan
Maybe AC does some *really*
Maybe AC does some *really* heavy crypto on his firewall?
No, they’re just a walking
No, they're just a walking advertisment for birth control
LOL!
LOL!
And here it is another
And here it is another example of a spoiled person, who survives thanks to his daddy’s wallet.
You’re literally fucking
You’re literally fucking retarded.
I’ve never had as much trouble with AMD drivers than with my intel/nvidia laptop right now – which every time it wakes up from hibernate or sleep ejects the gtx960m. Not to mention shadowplay is literally fucking broken and the nvidia control panel is the most shit slow piece of software I’ve ever used. This is across drivers 352.86, 358.87, 372.90, & 373.06.
On a brand new windows install too.
I would rather prefer a mobile rx 460. Going with an nvidia card when there’s an AMD equivalent is about the worst mistake anyone could possibly make.
Enjoy paying extra for a worse experience, plebian.
I used a A4-5000 cpu with a
I used a A4-5000 cpu with a asrock AM1 board for my pfsense router. It worked really well for that. I tried using it as a plex media center but the CPU just could not cut it. Not bad for $60.
I’m glad you guys cleaned up
I’m glad you guys cleaned up the comments from the psycho that posted a bit ago. Something is clearly very wrong with that person.
As for the article and the product, I could totally see buying this in a pinch while waiting for Zen or something better to come along. I used a dinky Raspberry Pi as a web server for my website for over a year… ran flawlessly the entire time. If I can do that with a Pi, I could do plenty with this cheap board. Not bad at all.
Weird, they benched it with a
Weird, they benched it with a 290X GPU???
These are great little /
These are great little / cheap boards. You can use an old power supply as the power requirements are so low. Stick a single cheap DIMM in there and you have a system that can do a lot of things: pfSense, home file server, small time virtual machine farm (I.e. nothing wrong with running a bunch of game servers on this!). Or use it as a Linux workstation.
I picked up a similar Athlon 5350, 8GB DIMM, and a motherboard for ~ $60 total from my Microcenter due to a combo deal they had 6 months ago. Had a case that was $20, and an old PSU (“free”).. For the price of 2 raspberry pis you get a lot more..
Ugh. AMD 5200 isn’t good
Ugh. AMD 5200 isn’t good enough to run a car stereo imo. My neighbor hated his HP all in one touchscreen system based on that thing he ended up selling it to me for $90. I have it set up in my garage and all I use it for is running a personal weather station which it does just fine. Anything more than that though and it struggles. Web browsing with it is an exercise in patience to say the least. It’s fan spins up just to play YT videos.
That’s because it was an HP
That’s because it was an HP piece of shit. The actual chip is fine and if you can’t do web browsing then it’s probably your fault.
This genius tests a BGA APU
This genius tests a BGA APU with a R9-290 and complains that power consumption spikes to ~300W under load?
Mary’s comment was egregious,
Mary’s comment was egregious, sure, it was spam and not related to the topic, but it was funny to respond to. And now you pick the time to delete spam comments? lol , boooooooooooo
*wasn’t egregious
*wasn’t egregious
Sorry, deleting a comment
Sorry, deleting a comment kills the replies. If it makes you feel better I did get a laugh out of it.
Power draw on this board is
Power draw on this board is absolutely awful, 20+W at idle? Jesus christ. Hopefully that’s just wasted draw from the PSU
Can’s wait for the Bristol
Can’s wait for the Bristol Ridge(BR) AM4 motherboards and the non gimped by Any OEM options. When are the home system builder AM4 motherboards for the BR based home system builder market going to arrive? I thought that by OCT 2016 there was going to be some lower power AM4/BR home system builder options. I know that the AM4/X370 chip sets are not going to be available until Zen arrives but the other lower end AM4 chip set based motherboards should have arrived by now after BR was announced. That OEM/BR/OEM gimped AM4 motherboard crap is never going in my home! I’ll wait and Build my own.
What gives MotherBoard makers, Where’s the AM4 motherboards!
Check out this
Check out this http://carbonite.co.za/f20/amd-zen-141214/index1.html#post972366 explains so many things about Zen things, including why motherboards are going to be very late. It could also explain why the motherboard used at AMD’s Zen demonstration event was still an early prototyping motherboard (with coaxial test points used for debugging). The poster is well known overclocker and creator of the online magazine TheOverclocker http://www.theoverclocker.com/ thus rather credible source.
Intel’s new Apollo Lake makes
Intel’s new Apollo Lake makes this redundant, and easily trouncing this old AMD Kabini chip in all areas including CPU performance (example https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/compare/567708?baseline=378685 ), integrated GPU performance (especially video codec acceleration support) and efficiency (ie. power consumption). Example review http://www.technikaffe.de/anleitung-394-asrock_j4205_itx_im_test__apollo_lake_mit_hdmi_2.0_und_hevc_10bit Intel’s Apollo Lake can handle 10bit HEVC decoding of up to 4K resolution, and with low power consumption as well.