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My PC blew up a while ago. Power supply failure. I've stuck a new power supply in, but it looks very much like it took the motherboard out with it when it went. 😡
I've just been pricing up a new mobo. But thanks to ever-shifting standards that would also mean buying new memory, a new CPU and new CPU cooler. £200-£350. 😯
I'm perfectly happy with the speed of my PC so in theory I should be able to get an old motherboard from somewhere that I can do a straight swap with.
Looking for a mobo to replace my fried "ABit AN8 Ultra" that has:
- AMD socket 939 support
- can take 4GB DDR 400 PC3200
- ATX form factor
- has proper temperature monitoring and fan speed control on-board
Any thoughts?
(I've looked on eBay. There were a couple of hits but I'm largely worried about getting a duffer).
Have you tried [url= http://microdirect.co.uk ]microdirect[/url]
[url= http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/40988/Asrock-motherboard-939N68PV-GLAN-AMD-Socket-939 ]is this any good?[/url]
Have you tried microdirect
Yep. My first port of call.
Only one and it is a micro-ATX form factor.
Can you not get a micro-atx board and fit it in an atx case? Or do you need the expansion?
Can you not get a micro-atx board and fit it in an atx case? Or do you need the expansion?
Possibly.. though I suspect it might be a bit too compact.
I've got a chuffing huge Scythe Ninja cooling stack for the CPU and a big graphics card with thick passive-cooling fins on it. They take up quite a bit of room.
mATX will fit in any ATX case just fine.
What cpu do you have? A cheap s775 cpu + mobo + ram won't run to much, e.g. a g31m-es2l and a e5300 (what I have, will do 3.2gig on the stock cooler easy), that lot's about £140 all in.
The size of the cooler and gfx card have no bearing on the mobo size. The relative positions of everything are pretty much fixed, just more slots on a bigger board
Probably looking at Ebay.
Although I will look around as did have an old Mobo somewhere and think it may have been 939, no promises though as cleared out a lot of stuff.
What cpu do you have?
CPU: Athlon 64 x2 3800
GFX: Gigabyte Radeon X800XL graphics card
MOBO: Abit AN8 Ultra (nForce4)
MEM: 4 x 1GB Geil DDR400
Decent set up when I bought it (back in 2005).
The size of the cooler and gfx card have no bearing on the mobo size. The relative positions of everything are pretty much fixed, just more slots on a bigger board
Ahh didn't know that. Well I don't need the extra PCI slots.
My main concern was maintaining good airflow. (I hate hot PCs and noisy fans).
Although I will look around as did have an old Mobo somewhere
Cheers Drac.
That budget Asrock 39N68PV-GLAN is the only thing showing up anywhere.
I [i]guess[/i] it would do. Though it only has one fan header, so it obviously doesn't have any nice fan-control capabilities. And it has built-in graphics which I don't need.
"My main concern was maintaining good airflow. (I hate hot PCs and noisy fans)."
Assuming you just have the GFX card in there, and no other expansion cards, everything will still be where it was before. The main reason to have a big board thesedays is for SLI setups and wanting to keep a decent gap between the GFX cards. Which is an issue for hardly anyone.
Cool. Happy with microATX then, but multiple fan headers and on-board fan control would be good.
I'd not worry too much about that stuff. Decent quality fans, or a cheap fan controller will sort that stuff out for you.
Though if I were you, instead of £50 on a 939 mobo, i'd be tempted to upgrade to a cheap s775 board, cpu and RAM, fair performance increase to be had. Or try and get a cheap 939 mobo off ebay...
Thank IA. I've got pretty decent fans in it (it's a Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case, with nice "silent" 120mm fans front and rear) and a Scythe Ninja cooler with another 120mm fan on it.
Fan controllers just seem a dumb solution to me: why fiddle with knobs to manually adjust fan speeds when the PC can monitor what temperature various components are running at and can adjust the fans itself dynamically?
My (broken) mobo did all this in BIOS for you. Automatically adjusting the voltage to the fans based on configurable temperature ranges, so they only spin as fast as required.
Failing that I'd run something like [url= http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php ]SpeedFan[/url] in the background to adjust it for me, but again that requires proper motherboard fan headers, which budget boards like the Asrock don't seem to have.