motherboard replacements

Do you know what I hate? When things break. Especially when you’re a college student. Money is tight enough as it is, and when the breakage interrupts work, it’s just awful.

Some more context is necessary. As I mentioned in my blog post, “the inspiron,” my motherboard died last Monday. The timing could not have been worse. The notes I typed up for my class had vanished, because I foolishly put them into a notepad document, and not Word, which autosaves. I proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes verifying that it was indeed my motherboard that had broken. Lo and behold, I was right.

This isn’t the first time the motherboard has broken in this computer. A few years ago I bought this computer from a co-worker who was upgrading. It had great specs, with an i7-4770k, 16 GB of RAM, and a sleek case to boot. I got it for a nice price of around $300. I took it home, put my GTX 1060 in, and the next thing I knew the motherboard broke. Same-day breakage, unbelievable. I found a replacement online for around $150, and it’s been fine until now.

Replacing the board now wouldn’t be so bad if I had a steady income. However, in college, those numbers in my bank account never go up. Thankfully, I got my new board plus the IO shield for a cheap $70, but I had to make some sacrifices to overclocking capabilities. It was either a simple replacement or a complete overhaul of my system, which would’ve cost me $400ish for the build I would want.

The new board came in the other day, arriving much sooner than I thought it would. Turns out I had ordered a Micro ATX board instead of a full-sized ATX, so I had to move standoffs around to compensate. It took me much longer than I thought it would to get everything set up; I spent maybe 30 minutes alone installing the board, mostly because of difficulties getting the screws into place. I spent another 15 minutes getting all my wires back into place thanks to my triple monitor setup.

All in all, minus the smaller board, the setup is nearly identical. I’m limited in the number of PCI slots now, but the only one I ever needed was a 3.0 slot for my graphics card. From my hour-long testing (which included playing games), it seems to run just as fast as it did before. If the motherboard decides to konk out on me again, I’ll probably just do a brand new build. I heard those new 10th Gen Intel processors are snappy.