13 year old budget gamer and the motherboard

 To give you a bit of perspective, I bought this motherboard way back in mid 2012 and this was my first build. I knew very little and at that time this was a very good choice. (I was 13 years old! )

960GM GS3 FX is MicroATX budget motherboard based on the 760G chipset and hence, the AM3+ socket. And this is my rig .......

CPU : Athlon X2 270 3.4Ghz

RAM : 4GB 1333 Mhz

MOBO : ASRock 960GM-GS3-FX

PSU :  Antec VP500PC

HD : WD 1TB Caviar Blue

As you can see, my rig is kind of a rat's nest and you can't see the merchandise very clearly. Sooo...........

Now on to the motherboard...  

A major selling point and the reason why I chose to buy this motherboard is that it is one of the few that has integrated onboard graphics thanks to its Radeon HD 3000 iGPU. Not the best graphics solution in the whole world but can play Dead Space 2 (low settings) at 30 FPS stable. And it is sufficient for MOBA gaming!!!

It has 4 SATA 2 ports for ample storage. Single PCI-E 2.0 16x slot for single GPU configuration and 1x slot for expansion cards. It has two USB 2.0 headers supporting 4 USB ports, which is rather nice. Two DIMM slots is kind of scarce but in a budget mobo at his price, it is pretty good and it supports dual channel DDR3 1800Mhz.

Rear I/O has 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 PS/2 ports, RJ45 LAN connector and HD Audio Jacks. Pretty decent and perfect for my needs.  

No fancy UEFI bios, but at this price point what do you expect? And this is all you'll need because if you think you're going to get a solid overclock on this board? DREAM ON!!!  

But some of the low points of this mobo is the absence of SATA 3 ports or USB 3.0 ports. But doesn't bother me much as I do not use an SSD or have USB 3.0 devices.

If you are setting up your first build and need something to put your budget processor like an Athlon II X4 or even an FX series CPU (if you don't plan to overclock!) , look no further! This is the mobo for you. Absence of SATA 3 and USB 3.0 ports may be a deal breaker for some, but if you are builder like me, you wouldn't even mind them.