The 970 Pro Gaming/Aura from ASUS is part of the manufacturer's Gaming-Series motherboards, which makes it feature a black PCB and red-colored heatsinks. This board certainly offers more than just a pretty color scheme like for instance great versatility regarding storage and peripheral connectors like USB 3.1 and M.2 SSD. Also the price of this motherboard is very competitive.


ASUS doens't need any introduction here, hovewer we're going to spend a few words on what ASUS must have been thinking putting this platform together. The AM3 socket was released in 2009 when AMD introduced their Phenom II series processors and the back in the days the chipset supported DDR2 as well as DDR3. In 2011, AMD released Bulldozer as well as the AM3+ socket. There are only small differences between AM3 and AM3+. In fact, even today you can use an AMD AM3+ CPUs on an older AM3 motherboard.

Since the platform/chipset definitely not young anymore one could ask why ASUS is using the 970 chipset instead the more powerful 990FX. The answer is quite clear to us: with this particular board ASUS wanted to create a well equipped board priced as low as possible.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Tomb Raider
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 8	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1