Category: Tech

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Choosing the Best Budget Motherboard

How Did We Get Here?

The price and availability of new PC products often force us to seek budget options. This can turn out well if someone is parting with older hardware for a fair price, but it can lead to problems. The most obvious issue is matching a processor with a motherboard, or compatible memory. Intel processors don’t work in AMD sockets and vice versa. That is far from the worst problem, though and sometimes a socket that fits still won’t work.

Intel’s LGA 1151 socket spans four generations of chip architecture, but supporting infrastructure keeps ninth generation motherboards from running with a sixth generation CPU. They will physically fit into the socket, but will not function. The type of Double Density Rate memory also makes a difference. Sixth generation CPUs run on DDR3 and DDR4 in most cases, but seventh gen rarely works with DDR3.

AMD also has it’s quirks. Earlier AM4 motherboards lacked the ability to store configurations for all compatible chips forcing users to choose older Zen CPUs or more recent ones. This was corrected in newer hardware, but when AM4 was originally released, it wasn’t a thought.

So, what can we do?

Research. This doesn’t mean prompting your chat bot to see if hardware will coexist. This means actually finding examples, getting support information from company websites, or forums on the subject. There are many quirks when matching hardware other than a graphics cards limitations when running on a board with PCIe 3.0 as opposed to PCIe 4. And yes, that can be a real problem. I touch on it a bit in this video.

AMD and Intel both have full listings of chip set compatibility on their support pages. This, coupled with information from motherboard manufacturer’s support pages can help you find the right platform. It should also help you pick the right type of memory. Keep in mind, there are differences in DDR3 and DDR3L, and very big differences in ECC and standard. Servers often use Error Correcting Code ram to limit failures, while retail DDR is more tolerant. They are no more cross compatible than DDR3 is to 4 or even DDR5.

Make allowances for some parts still being in high demand and out of your target budget, when a similar item may do the job. Earlier fourth generation Xeon processors (LGA 1150) CPUs fit and worked in mainstream motherboards. In some cases, you may find an i5 that runs almost as well as it’s 7th gen cousin for half the price. Many earlier multi-threaded platforms didn’t take advantage of all of the cores available, and a faster clocked i5 may work better than a slower clocked i7 for your need.

Any Last Tips?

Be Patient. The perfect deal may not come until after you have something that may be ‘good enough’. If you find an upgrade for your use case, it’s okay to get faster memory later, or upgrade that 9500 to a 9700K when it fits your budget. Just remember, someone may want that 9500. With prices like they are, there is a thriving market for used hardware. It was one major software company that tried to tell us our hardware was no good, but there are other software options if you are a bit adventurous. But, that’s for another blog.

I touch on some of the struggles with software in this blog. I’ll post more as I explore Linux Distros.

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When a PC Hardware Repair Goes Better than Expected

How Did We Get Here

Lately, I find myself making attempts to find broken or untested hardware on the cheap. I don’t go randomly selecting things that have no hope for repair; I search listings looking for clues that may indicate what the issue is before I start looking at prices. When I find something I may be able fix, and the price is right, I’ll take the chance.

There have been a number of such purchases lately, with the most success coming from motherboards. There have also been a few misses, mainly with graphics cards. The latest video attempting to repair a motherboard is here, while the extra details here. It doesn’t always work, sometimes you get a bad CPU and it’s difficult to tell on which component to lay the blame

This particular case is a Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 from AsRock. It’s a quality board and the price was right. The seller did disclose not testing the board due to bent pins, and they could be seen in the pictures. I set my sights on a cheap processor to test with and all in with shipping I was in for about fifty bucks.

Testing

The pins were tedious, but repairable. After about two hours of meticulous work, it was ready to test. My new Celeron G4900 was actually a used CPU, but the whole set up worked. The two cores of the Celeron aren’t a great match for the motherboard, but it’s a good starting point. At the time of this writing, an upgrade has arrived.

I have a suite of games I normally test, and these worked with one exception. Borderlands Three stayed on the intro screen, the entire forty-five minutes I let it. I point that game out because Borderlands Four actually did work on the new set up and the results were predictable. Neither the processor nor the graphics card are suitable for playing this game but it turned in a respectable 20-24 frames per second on low with upscaling.

I was able to update the bios, and run other games including Call of Duty, that requires anti cheat. The results weren’t great, barely reaching 30FPS in most situations, but we are ready to move on to the next phase. That is where things took a turn.

Failure

Having tested the Celeron, I looked for a more powerful processor and arrived on an 8700K with six cores and twelve threads. Ideally, this would rival newer budget type setups and I looked forward to it. This, however, didn’t go as well. The 8700K doesn’t post, even with a new BIOS, clearing the CMOS, and trying different RAM placement. The motherboard has a debug indicator that stays on ’00’ with the fans running full speed.

I tried several things to troubleshoot and have to believe that the CPU itself is bad. This presents me with two options. I can buy another board to test, whether its just a board, or an old Optiplex, or I can get another CPU. I have plenty of ‘broken’ prebuilts, and found a ninth generation i5, that should be here this week.

If the issue turns out to be the 8700K I’ll have to file a claim, but the platform I purchased on has a great buyer protection program, so I should be safe. If the issue is the board, it complicates things just a bit, because I can’t completely rule out the processor. Getting a new board means all new tests and by the time I am able to verify the 8700K is the issue, it may be too late to file a claim.

So, What’s next?

That was actually dictated by more shopping for used parts. Ideally, a score would have been a cheap office prebuilt with an eighth or ninth gen processor. That allows me to check both parts in question. What I’ve found so far is an i5 9400F, which allows me to test the motherboard. If it arrives quickly enough, I can at least test the three sock theory.

Okay, for those unfamiliar, it’s a dark laundry room and you have two different color socks in the dryer. How do you pull a matching pair? You have to pull at least three to take into the light, two of the three will be the same color, possibly all three. Having three CPUs helps me reasonably assess if the problem is the processor, or the board.

This won’t be the last stop for the 8th or 9th gen set up. It’s not a current platform, but collecting at least one working platform over the past several generations helps me test a variety of conditions. It allows me to test a variety of games, Linux distros, applications and even hardware for compatibility. I will eventually get another motherboard, but for the time being, I’ll go with what I have.

I spent as much time troubleshooting the new CPU as I did fixing the board in the first place and there are better things to do with the set up, even if I can’t get my money back. I’m still happy with the board and the initial testing and when I get the i5 to test, there will be a video and of course, a blog.

Feel free to check out the other YouTube videos and Blogs.

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Is buying untested parts an exciting opportunity or a complete disaster?

How Did We Get Here?

That part was easy. I bought a Z97 motherboard based on suggestions from my YouTube channel. Then it got complicated. The board failed almost immediately.

I tried a number of things to save it, but to no avail. It wasn’t the seller’s fault, and in their defense, it worked when I got it, for about an hour. Then it gave up, completely. If you are curious about that experiment, the video is here, and the blog is here.

My second attempt included buying an untested MSI Z97 and giving that a shot. I could see in the pictures it had a few bent pins, so I knew it didn’t work, but forty bucks was a good price to risk a fix. Getting the board, II discovered more bent pins. It turned riskier with that discovery.

Did it Work?

An hour later I had all pins but one in place, and it was ready to test. That one pin broke, and it would make or break the whole effort. My hope was that was for ground or for future use, but if it were a memory controller or something, then it’s bad.

A series of boot loops, a BIOS reset, and reseating memory, and it booted. Success, sort of. That was only part of the challenge, I still didn’t know if it actually functioned. I updated the BIOS, added more memory and installed an OS, and it still worked. Now I was feeling better.

The last thing was to stress the CPU. I was using an i5 4430 to test, and downloaded Cinebench 2026. And, although the 693 score is not groundbreaking, it was a valid test and I could breathe again. I had a platform and a baseline and I could do some more aggressive testing with a more powerful CPU. Mission accomplished.

Wait? That’s it?

Of course not.

First, I did see bent pins in the pictures from the seller and knew what to expect, but my first attempt failed because there were pins I didn’t see that were bent. It wasn’t until I ran my finger over the pins for an idea of top alignment, that I found problem areas. A closer examination showed other bent pins. One of which snapped off instead of bending back into place.

Whether it’s for ground or future use, I don’t know, but all four memory slots worked and the CPU didn’t show timing issues, so I now have an LGA 1149 socket that seems to work. We’ll see if that holds with the XEON CPU.

My other nitpick is with Maxon. A lot of people still use Cinebench R20, or R23, and they have made it incredibly difficult to find on their site. R20 is a much more appropriate test with older hardware, even without full support. I need to bring back ‘Shady’ or Brilliant’ in one of my videos. This is definitely Shady.

Other than that, this worked great and I’m happy. Next will be tests with the 4670, the Xeon 1270v3 and eventually, it may be my NAS server. I only have one case that fits an excess number of HDDs, but a recent purchase may help. It’s not a case, it’s a hard drive cage. Now if I can only find a case to put it in.

The video for this adventure is here.

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Liquid or Air cooling a PC, what makes You happy?

How did we get here?

Noise. Honestly, that’s it. It came down to how much noise my rig was making while I was trying to stream. End of Blog, right? Maybe not, I may actually need to explain a bit.

The original configuration in a Montech King 95 case was two 140mm fins blowing in from the side and a Corsair H100i, with the radiator top mounted. There was nothing wrong with this configuration, and as the temperature testing showed, it worked quite well. The problem was that keeping that nice cool temp meant the fans ramped up and even during moderate loads, would get loud. It wasn’t unbearable, the placement next to my mic meant extra noise in my streams. Again, my mic didn’t pick a lot up, but every bit helps when you are streaming.

What was my solution?

I chose to go with a tower air cooler and rearrange the fans. Specifically, I installed a ThermalRight Assassin air cooler and changed the airflow patter with the fans. Instead of the top fans all blowing up and out, the top front fan blows in and the rear top fan blows out. My hope was to assist in bringing air in to have fresh air across the CPU.

There have been many videos made and blogs written about airflow and what is proper, but all seem to point to a diminishing return after so many fans, so I kept it simple. The top would have one in and one out, and the back fans was exhaust. I considered adding a fan at the bottom pushing in to feed clean air to the GPU, but during tests the GPU temp went down, so I scrapped the idea until later. It’s still an option, but for now it’s fine.

Speaking of tests, I ran several ten minute passes of CineBench 2026. I won’t give my opinion of the new app, or the difficulty finding the old ones, yet. CineBench R23 is one of my favorite CPU tests and Maxon chooses to hide it now. The 2026 version does allow you to test CPU single core, Multi core and GPU, so for this test it worked well. The important thing was to get a lengthened load test for the temps.

And?

The All in One kept the CPU cooler. It was also louder, as discussed previously. There were two surprises, though. The first and biggest, was that even without a fan blowing air on the GPU, the temperature went down slightly. It was only from 65C to 63C, but it was a measurable and repeatable change.

The other surprise was just how quiet the ThermalRight fans were. TL-C12C fans come in a set of five, and I’m sold on them. Not convinced that a ten minute test was enough, I also sat down for an hour long gaming session and was very pleased. In the associated video, I do a comparison, and the difference is noticeable.

The temp was higher on the CPU with the fans, but well within a comfortable range at around 63C. The noise level more than makes up for it and the inconvenience of a noisy stream is averted. This won’t meet everyone’s standards, but that’s the reason for the title in the first place. It’s very subjective.

What’s next?

For me, I will consider placing a fan on the bottom to introduce more clean air to the GPU. I may also decide I don’t need it, after all, GPU temps went down. I’m definitely staying with the tower cooler and will eventually use the H100 for another build. I may just stick with the Air Cooler, though. its much cheaper. AIOs are less expensive, now, but a good tower cooler still beats it.

There is also the lack of maintenance, I have had my fun cleaning All in One coolers, and I am just fine only cleaning fans. Actually, a lot of my channel has to do with fixing things and learning lessons, including this last one with a Z97 motherboard. I’m also sure this won’t be the last visit on this subject.

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It’s not failure if you learn something. The important Z97 lesson.

How Did We Get Here?

That part’s easy. Computer component prices are ridiculous and people are looking anywhere they can to save money. This includes PCs and systems with older parts. In some cases, much older, as in ten years old.

One such case is trying to revive PCs that use DDR3 memory instead of the current standard DDR5. The problem there is that the dominant Operating system for these PCs no longer supports finely aged hardware. I won’t dwell on the details of the many different work arounds or the options, I’ll just say that those products are still in demand, and in some cases fetch as much as newer budget motherboards and components.

My plan was simple. I have a B85 motherboard that supports 4th gen Intel CPUs. It was suggested that I try thew Z97, which is the full feature version of that generation. I found one for a reasonable price, ordered it, received it, and set up to test. At this point I was happy, I found the board for a reasonable price and it came in beautiful shape. My happiness didn’t last.

It’s not failure, it’s learning.

The set up went well enough. I have a known good test bench and known good components, so I went to work. After setting everything up I hit the power switch and noticed my first issue. The signal initially come from the video card, then stopped. Luckily the i5 4670 has on board graphics, and I was able to get into the bios.

I though the RX480 I was using finally gave up the ghost, so I switched cards. Not only did I get a signal, but I was able to set up in the BIOS and on the reboot went straight into windows. Success! Except for about an hour later, the PC wouldn’t ‘wake’. The following reboot, didn’t boot.

I set about testing all of the component’s, the power switch, power supply, reset the BIOS, everything. Nothing. I even went back and tested the RX480 that I though might have dies and it works fine. There was only two possible culprits. After swapping the 4670 into the B*% motherboard, we were down to one.

What Did I learn?

The first thing I learned was that my troubleshooting process was sound. I also learned that even with a bad deal, something good can come of it. I made YT content and this blog. And, I learned, or relearned, that used parts fail. They don’t always fail spectacularly, like the RTX 2060 in the blog here , but eventually they do fail. Knowing that keeps me from being upset, but I am disappointed.

What do I plan to do next? I’m already looking for another Z97 board, but as I mentioned I’m trying to find a good deal, especially now that the investment has another seventy five bucks tacked onto it. When I find one, I’ll do more testing. Until then I will just do more learning, like not matching modern components with much older hardware.

If you are curious how this experiment went, feel free to check out the video here.