ASUS M5A97 EVO Pro Reviews

ASUS’s M5A99X EVO and M5A97 EVO mainboards are high-quality products which only differ from their top-end cousins in the variety of additional controllers and expansion slots. Their functionality is board enough and includes all modern interfaces: USB 3.0, SATA 6 Gbit/s, eSATA and IEEE1394 (FireWire). So if you do not plan to use a lot of graphics cards, each of them can be a good choice. The only downside is that the overclocking potential of the junior chipsets is lower than that of the flagship AMD 990FX. And we’re talking about ASUS mainboards which have turned out to be the best choice for overclocking the new Bulldozer series. The results are going to be even more disappointing with other mainboards, we guess. Anyway, we have no doubt about the bright market future of the M5A99X EVO and M5A97 EVO mainboards. People who look for highest performance prefer Intel whereas AMD users have other priorities. The AMD platform is quite good for building an affordable computer with acceptable performance and these ASUS mainboards cost much less than their flagship counterparts.

To sum it up this board has actually surpassed my expectations. For a board to give this type of performance in its price range is pretty amazing. Asus have once again demonstrated why they dominate the motherboard market. They consistently produce products that surpass customer expectations. You really can’t do much better than that. This board has many features that make it an outstanding value when compared to similarly priced offerings. You also have the Asus name and their 3 year warranty to back it up. If you’re looking for a board that will be ready for AMD’s new line of processors but you don’t want to spend an arm and a leg for it, then this is probably the board for you. Just keep in mind the few annoyances that you need to be aware of and you won’t be disappointed.

We really had a hard time forming any opinion about the ASUS M5A97 EVO, until we considered the price. Our testing showed low numbers when compared with other recent products, but this was largely influenced by the CPU used, a rather old 45nm chip, while the others are 32nm. We do see a lot of potential in the M5A97 EVO; the BIOS, software, and VRM are all very robust, but at the same time, we do know that ASUS has spent a lot of time focusing on these critical areas. ASUS has done a fantastic job on this product and in this price range, which we are sure will become more obvious once we add more AMD results to our performance compares. Good job ASUS, another stellar product; it did take a few lumps, but quickly brushed them off, and kept on fighting.