m51BC or M5A97 EVO2?

[sonofpern]

I recently bought a modest M51BC refurbished for $189 since that price is way better than what I was going to spend on a similar build. The motherboard says M51BC in CPU-Z and SpeedFan, but the sticker on the motherboard says M5A97 EVO2 which was incidentally the mobo I was about to buy anyway. Is there a difference? How do I know which it actually is? Should I add a pic of it? If they aren't the same thing, I don't even want to speculate, just at a loss to understand which twilight zone episode I'm in. I immediately added my old HDD, RAM, PSU, GPU and CPU cooler and some extra fans. Turned out to be a decent build for under $300 if you include what I added and I'm not even annoyed that it's windows 8.1.....yet.

FX-6300 + Hyper T2 cooler
?mobo?
1x8GB + 2x4GB RAM
2 X 500GB 7200RPM HDD
EVGA 450BT PSU
GT 710 2GD3LP fan cooled (I know, don't laugh, it runs astroneer over 30 FPS with a 2nd monitor active and that's enough for me, for now)

One day, I may find some better RAM and want to overclock over 4GHz for reasons that don't exist today, so I'd like to have a little confidence in my hardware. Of course, I don't plan on dropping more money on this build for anything that won't be useful in a future Ryzen build or something. The current system seems to handle 4.0GHz@1.4V for about 30 minutes stressed before it goes over 52C and I'm not going past 52C with a $10 cooler and a $30 PSU on an unidentified mobo. It's not like any games I successfully run through a GT 710 NEED more than 4GHz on CPU anyway, and it's nice to finally be able to play JustCause3 after living in A6-5200 land with 8GB RAM for way too long. My biggest issue aside from ?mobo? is why my GT 710 gets hotter in this build than the old one, but I just imagine its because everything else in the new sys is generating more heat. Thanks in advance for any help, love me some Tom's forums!

 

[Dunlop0078]

M51BC is the name of an ASUS prebuilt tower, it is not a motherboard. If the motherboard says M5A97 EVO on it then that is what it likely is.

AMD recommends that CPU stay under 62c core tep. 52c is perfectly fine. 1.4v for 4.0ghz is quite excessive, that CPU will likely run stable at 4.0ghz with between 1.3-1.35v, maybe even less if you have a good chip. However you are right in that overclocking the CPU will do nothing for you in games due to that GPU.

The GPU likely gets hotter in that build because the FX 6300 can put it under a higher sustained load than your old APU could. That or interrior case temps are higher with the FX 6300 setup.

 

[sonofpern]

Thanks you. I just had to ask because CPU-Z and others call the mobo M51BC. I figured I could trust the label on it and assume that it's a business model thing. I've had a graphics card pull the wrong drivers before, so I worried it may cause problems if I treated it like the wrong kind of motherboard or, worse even, if the drivers were incorrect.

I forgot to mention, I don't seem to have Asus AI options in my UEFI BIOS, no way to OC there it seems. Is that because of the MOBO, BIOS version, or should I just research more about that specific path? I use AMD OD to control my clock and voltage etc. I pushed it to 1.4 expecting to go higher than 4GHz but I chickened out haha probably a good thing, I usually run 3-3.2GHz@1.2875V to keep the case heat low since nothing I do today needs more than 3GHz. It seems to work, but maybe that's incidental, not sure. Does higher voltage at the same clock affect the heat output of the CPU? I would think that it might have a small affect, but it seemed to drop 4-5C of the CPU temp, though I admit it was a casual test.

 

[sonofpern]

All the specs, layout, heat sinks, pci slots accessory connections match the EVO2. It seems that, in the business model m51BC, this is the standard board used so it just gets listed that way. Looks like I got a pretty good deal all around.

 

[Dunlop0078]

Thanks you. I just had to ask because CPU-Z and others call the mobo M51BC. I figured I could trust the label on it and assume that it's a business model thing. I've had a graphics card pull the wrong drivers before, so I worried it may cause problems if I treated it like the wrong kind of motherboard or, worse even, if the drivers were incorrect.

I forgot to mention, I don't seem to have Asus AI options in my UEFI BIOS, no way to OC there it seems. Is that because of the MOBO, BIOS version, or should I just research more about that specific path? I use AMD OD to control my clock and voltage etc. I pushed it to 1.4 expecting to go higher than 4GHz but I chickened out haha probably a good thing, I usually run 3-3.2GHz@1.2875V to keep the case heat low since nothing I do today needs more than 3GHz. It seems to work, but maybe that's incidental, not sure. Does higher voltage at the same clock affect the heat output of the CPU? I would think that it might have a small affect, but it seemed to drop 4-5C of the CPU temp, though I admit it was a casual test.

I'm not sure why those settings wouldn't be available in the BIOS, they should be on that board. Might be because it came with a pre built and had a special BIOS or something.

Core voltage affects temps far more than clock speed. For example if you were at 1.3v 3.5ghz, then overclocked the cpu to 4.0ghz without changing voltage temps likely wouldn't change very much.

 

[sonofpern]

ive gone in circles on this 100 times now haha the board has printed on it (not just the sticker) M5A97 EVO2 but it looks a lot different than the EVO2 manual i downloaded, different heat sinks, PCI slot config. mine has the semi flat silver heatsink on the VRMs. It seems the M51BC version IS different but I can't find a manual for the M51BC version. Maybe because it is a business computer. I will contact ASUS directly and see what they can provide me for data sheets and a manual. I just want to know what I'm working with.