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Comment by stephenitis | Hacker News Reader

What part of your PC died?

Motherboard. New motherboard…so new cpu socket (mine was Broadwell)…and new ram needed.

GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous.

The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad.

Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices.

I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.

So, you have DDR4?

Pick any B550 with a VRM heatsink for $90, a 5600 for $190, and you are back in business.

Get a 5070 or 9070 before GDDR supply is completely gone if you want an actual upgrade.

As for GPU price, that Vega 64 was $500 in 2018. Even a midrange GPU hasn't been $300 since the Radeon RX 480 launched a decade ago.

Just bought a B550 and a Ryzen 5 5500. Both were on sale on newegg. 30-40% off so and under 200 bucks. Grabbed a new case since my current one is practically falling apart. Will be back in business in a couple days. Thanks for the advice.

This is essentially what I did and it worked a treat. Get in while the getting's still good. Having a modern but DDR4 compatible system is not obly a great way to get up and running now, but will help see you through this crisis long term.

Reading this thread I am so frickin glad I built a monster DDR4 workstation back in 2021. It would cost me more to build out that computer today (dual 3090s, 512GB ECC, 3995wx). Ram was so cheap back then.

Very neat. What's the power draw on this machine?

From the wall: 260W idle, ~1200W load (1600W PSU)

Similar thing happened here with my kid's 10 year old gaming PC. Motherboard dead. Had an existing 1070 and 16GB of DDR4. New DDR5 wasn't going to happen. New GPU wasn't going to happen. So I just got a Ryzen5 and an AM5 motherboard and re-used everything else. It runs just fine. It's fast enough.

Same I just built a dual Broadwell Xeon E5 server / NAS. Why? Because someone local was selling a cheap Chinese X99 motherboard, two Xeons, and 64GB of DDR4 RAM for $150 CAD. The deal was too good. So I built a machine around it. (Though what I should have done was shove it into an old Dell T630/730, and saved myself some hassle.)

Now is the time of re-using old tech.

Why don't you just get a MB only for now? What mandates an entire new batch of hardware?

I’ve been pricing out my various options but the notion of replacing a 10 year old motherboard with another 10 year old motherboard is kinda lousy.

The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement.

My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.

Buying a cheap secondhand motherboard is still less lousy than losing access to a game collection. I did that with a 13 years old computer and it cost 50€.

I agree that the current situation sucks, but I don't think one can say it locks someone on your situation out of your game collection.

(edit: misremembered, $2000 is not the price of the game collection)

10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)

Thanks for the advice gone look into it more this weekend

Oh I agree, I am just saying that if you really did not want to spend, there are obviously options. I am thinking of promoting my super old and long-time-not-used PC with an i7-3770 and 32GB DDR3 RAM to a server and I bought a ~$45 motherboard for it some months ago, now I have to bother finding it a good NAS case and buy at least two HDDs (the real cost here).

Point is, quite a lot of hardware can still do a lot. I have a Ryzen 5500U-based laptop that still outperforms the PCs of most people that I know (non-tech people).

Though in my case I feel like I have to get a loan to buy a workstation + an actual gaming PC for my wife. That all is beginning to look like at least $15k... yikes. But I am not sure I can wait until 2028 to see if things _start_ normalizing... Depressing indeed.

My Truenas setup runs on a i7-3770 with 16GB DDR3, still good tbh. Have a whole bunch of self hosted apps running on it exposed through tailscale.

Same, which is why im looking at some older epyc CPUs + ddr4 memory. the only issue being that i wont be able to use my current DDR4 ram in that new system but still... just hunting those ebay listings for a good combo from someone trusted (preferably local)

If it hadn't died, you'd still be running it.

I've been in the same boat since it seems something about the memory controller on my gaming PC's MB is broken, but price wise it feels like it just doesn't make sense. I could get something from eBay relatively cheap but then I'd probably spend an hour disassembling and reassembling just to maybe learn that the eBay unit has some equivalent issue or is slightly broken in some other way. I could old new stock for outrageous prices. Right now I'd rather just wait until either an upgrade would be REALLY worth it or at least prices come down.

Last time I replaced an old MB it was only $60. What prices are you seeing?

It wasn't the same model or vendor MB but it was a compatible one. Same chipset.

The cheapest compatible one I can see new (and one of the only ones...) is currently at 120: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601413455%20601409...

That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range.

Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it

It sounds like whining for the sake of it really.

can't you just buy a used same class motherboard from a marketplace?

I'd spend the $100 on a replacement motherboard if it was me, better than not being able to use the PC.

Could be less than $100 if buying used too maybe!

Buy an old motherboard compatible with your existing CPU. Reuse the CPU and RAM.

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