Is Micro ATX motherboard good enough for high end GPU's and CPU's?

[xStampede]

My comp is

CPU: i7 4790
Motherboard: Asus H97M-e

I'm planning on buying 290 or 280x, do cheap mATX board like mine hold well the higher end GPU's or could there be any problems? The Motherboard has NO heatsinks and the i7 4790 CPU is the strongest CPU you can mount on it.

Why aren't mATX board popular among gamers, is there any disadvantage in having a micro ATX board if higher end components are on it?

 

[Entomber]

no problem, unless you want to have a multi-GPU setup.

mATX usually doesn't have more than one PCIe slot

 

[xStampede]

no problem, unless you want to have a multi-GPU setup.

mATX usually doesn't have more than one PCIe slot

I won't need multi-GPU, it is ussualy a bad idea, better to have 1 stronger GPU.

I made a test in cinebench benchmark and CPU made a score of 807, saw other's score 816 with same CPU, that's why i thought of motherboard bottleneck.

 

[smackers_12]

Cheap boards are fine for single gpu setups. More expensive matx boards are usually sli/cf capable and some have the spacing to allow a gap in the cards for sli and cf, no z97 boards have this but there are one or two z87 and z77 boards with this. EVGA just released a micro atx lga 2011 board so they are definatley not just low end

 

[xStampede]

no problem, unless you want to have a multi-GPU setup.

mATX usually doesn't have more than one PCIe slot

I see you are running 2400MHz ram on non K i7, is it a good improvement from 1600MHz? I have 1866MHz CL9 Crucial ram that runs at 1600MHz due to mobo limit, Asus enabled some h97 to be able to overclock CPU but mine isn't one of those, anyway is there any chance that if i update the bios the motherboard will be able to run the ram at 1866MHz?

 

[Entomber]

RAM speed only mattered to me when I was playing Watch Dogs and there were huge VRAM leaks so it was heavily using my RAM. Before I just left it at 1600MHz but after bumping it up to 2400MHz the gameplay was significantly smoother. Other than that I saw no difference

 

[yumri]

in most consumer instances faster RAM past 1600MHz CAS 9 will earn you parts of a secound in increased or decreased speed so upgradeing becuase of RAM speed doesnt make that much sense anymore unless you are going to be running a RAM intensive long term program on the computer then yes the parts of a secound per instruction will add up to make a differnece but in gaming it doesnt unless the VRAM overflows are massive.