ALX is right trip it all comes down to power delivery. Although on the opposite side of the fence 'most' 990 boards are much better than the budget orientated 970's
All in all if you want to overclock an AMD 8 core youll spend the money you saved from INtel on a better motherboard and better cooling. (and electric)
Yeah the issue is board prices. Good ones don't come cheap, but due to Haswell and Skylake's power sipping cores you can get a good decent board for around £80 that will allow you to reach the high clocks. (on Intel)
It's a shame, because tbh? there are even fewer reasons to go AMD now but it's good for the masses.
For VMware and so on though AMD still offer absolutely cracking value. The cheaper Intel chips and most if not all of the "K" chips don't have the instruction sets needed to even run some of that stuff.
But yeah, even that doesn't justify the outlay because there's practically nothing in it when you go from 4.5 - 5ghz apart from a crap ton of heat you need to get rid of and fast. And the fets? crikey, they need proper cooling too. Back of my rig used to feel like a convection heater
i didnt say it was anything to do with the chipset, i pointed towards the 990 fx boards because they usually come with sufficient power delivery
They don't, though. I was fooled into buying two 990FX boards that were both rubbish.
Chipset just means SLI support, Crossfire X, SATA 3 etc. It has absolutely nothing to do with how a board clocks.
The only boards known to do 5ghz are the Saber, Giga UD5 and CHVFZ and they're expensive.
As I said to OP, just run the board you are looking at by us and we can do a bit of research and see what power phases it has.
Honestly, you would be absolutely amazed at how many 990FX boards are total crap for Vishera. They were designed when the Phenom 2 chips were around, so set up to supply a far less greedy 6 core CPU, not a 8 core nuclear power plant.
And that's the issue.