Are A320 Motherboards Worth it?

[Manlybunny]

So back during the Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales, I bought an Biostar x370 for a low price of $79. At the time I thought this was an amazing deal for an x370 motherboard. I also wanted to give Biostar a shot since they seemed underrated and shunned by the PC building community (now I know why). Only after a month of owning this garbage mobo, I'm experiencing random micro-stutters once every 30 minutes or so whiling playing gta 5 or Killing Floor 2, Microsoft Edge & Mozilla Firefox crash once in a blue moon, and I can't even run my RAM chips at 2400mhz (the speed they're designed to run at). I'm sure this isn't a CPU, GPU, or RAM issue so it only comes down to the motherboard. My solution is to buy a cheap but capable A320 board that can support 4 memory banks. I'm not planning to overclock the CPU, only the RAM and maybe the GPU.

I believe this one fits my requirements: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813144044&cm_re=a320m-_-13-144-044-_-Product


If anyone has any better suggestions for a new AM4 motherboard or if the a320 chipset is right for me, please tell me. Your also welcome to bash on Biostar if you want to. Thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

X370 is the highest end of all the Ryzen chipsets. Biostar just usually sucks and has low quality products except occasionally they put out something decent and their much older OEM boards were ok for what they were. I'd never buy one for a modern gaming or performance oriented system though.

If you have not yet updated your bios to whatever the latest version is, you need to do that, because pretty much ALL of the Ryzen motherboards regardless of what chipset they are or who they are made by, have had problems from the start and have mostly been ironed out by later revisions to the firmware.

You definitely don't want to go backwards, to an A320 chipset. Those are meant for bottom of the barrel basic internet browsing and low end business workstation machines. If you want the best performance and solid quality, look at some of the ASUS and Gigabyte X370 boards. As with anything, well most of the time, you get what you pay for. You buy an 80 dollar board, you get an 80 dollar board. You buy a 130 dollar board, you usually get a fairly decent middle of the pack board with most of the important features that the more expensive boards have but without the extras like eye candy, very high end sound and fantastic overclocking. But you can get a really good board without paying a ton if you do your homework.

Here is a pretty fair outline on the various Ryzen chipsets. I'd suggest you read it, seriously, as it will tell you a lot of what you need to know.

 

[Manlybunny]

Thanks for actually helping me here lol. I'll go with a Gigabyte X370 since I've had good luck with them in the past. Happy New Years btw

 

[Darkbreeze]

You as well. Good luck to you.