Hi everyone,

So my PC is slowly dying and its become apparent what is at fault. It is looking like the motherboard and potentially power supply are the culprits. I purchased the ASROCK Extreme 6 LGA1155 board in 2012 and the power supply which is an OCZ (650 I think...) in 2008.

The issue I'm having is that the motherboard is clearly broken as it has two RAM slots (slots 1 and 3) that will not pick up any ram, I've tried changing the slots around and those channels fail to read perfectly fine DDR3 RAM. I also have start up problems where it will continually boot loop. By this I mean the fans will power on but not much else, then it will power down for a second, and repeat the process. I have to hit the BIOS reset button on the mobo to get it boot past the looping.

My dilemma is that the Z77 / LGA1155 boards are old hat now and cost as much as a new board would for a current gen Intel CPU.

I'm running an i7 3770k and I don't have any CPU based performance issues currently so I was hoping to not have to change the chipset as I would need DDR4 ram too as well as a new CPU to match.

What do you think, should I spend between £80-150 on a new (older generation) board, or fork out a few hundred for an entirely new build. I really cant afford the latter, but with money being a factor, spending inefficiently just seems like a bad move. Maybe someone has a suggestion for a good cheap LGA 1155 board I could look at?

Any advice is appreciated!

Cheers,

-Perilion

I had to make this decision recently too. Given that you'd need new cpu and ram for 1150/1151 boards, matching your current build is gonna be a whole lot more expensive. I opted to just get a new 1155 board for my system and will probably hang on to it for a couple years.

I managed to get mine (a mini itx) for about $80 just a couple days ago, and newegg is listing 1155 boards for $40, so I don't think that's particularly close to the price of new board + new cpu + ram unless you went used on the newer stuff.

Wow its really reasonable. I'm from the UK and the sites I would normally hit for PC parts are all listing the entry level boards at around £70ish. So around $100. I'm currently watching on ebay in case any go cheap.

My only stipulation is that it has 4 ram channels. I've paid for the ram, I kind of want to use it hah.

If you can't afford it I think you answered your own question, get a replacment board and psu and hopefully nothing else is wrong. From my understanding the performance gains of the new processors aren't that huge a leap anyway so i'd only upgrade everything when you actually need/want too.

I definitely wouldn't spend £150 on an old motherboard. I did check out pcpartpicker and saw one for £68(including shipping), but I would definitely start saving up for a z170 and a new CPU.