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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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