Tag: budget

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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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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.

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When is saving an old PC a great idea?

How Did We Get Here?

To be quite frank, greed. Corporate greed and all around nosiness. Large tech companies want to maximize profit and any company that deals in information or software wants more information. If a company can make you existing item obsolete, many times they will. For example, Livermore, CA has a firehouse with a hundred year old light bulb. Except to move it or a power outage, its been operating since 1901. One hundred twenty five years. How many other bulbs have been changed in that same building? If all products were designed to last forever, we would only change them when they went out of style, or a natural disaster.

Planned Obsolescence, I’m sure is a term you have heard and its a very real thing. My opinion is that the recent solid operating system with a ten in it’s name and the shortages of hardware coinciding with an Artificial Intelligence boom were not by accident. Perfectly serviceable hardware that would be of great use during a product shortage is now obsolete. The information company’s new product excludes that same older hardware. They can’t collect the same amount of information on you to train, you guessed it, AI.

But Why?

Currently the Western world is in a state where the fear of missing out is a real thing. We want the newest mobile phone or the biggest TV. We need to keep up with everyone else, and we post it all, for everyone to see. It’s almost mandatory to prove our worth to others. It’s what large corporations count on, so they find ways to make that happen.

They emphasize that if you don’t have the new product, their new product, you’re missing out. You will fall behind. No one wants to fall behind, so you enter the vicious cycle and buy the next new thing. Consequently, they make the next new thing allowing the large companies to make something that still works, obsolete.

Enter where we are today. Some large companies, in an effort to get more of your information, find themselves impeded by the very thing they tried to promote. In the case of a company that sells a very popular Operating System, I don’t need to name names, they have rendered a massive amount of older hardware incompatible at the same time component shortages make it difficult to upgrade or buy new PCs.

I don’t think this was an accident. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but when you make older products non functioning and new hardware is expensive due to shortages for AI, corporations have a huge opportunity to profit off us while telling us it’s in our own best interest. Greed. Greed for profit on new parts and greed for your information so they can train AI to ‘give you what you want’.

What choice do we have?

Part of it is simple. If your tech does what you need it to do, wait out the rush and them pushing the narrative that you will miss out. They need everyone’s help, let them sweeten the deal. If you do end up missing something, maybe you didn’t really need it.

Another option is find a way to make do with a little less. Systems I build now may only have 16GB of RAM instead of 32, or maybe you can size down on storage until prices adjust. They need us to buy, and although they will get the eager, or maybe the desperate, a calm demeanor and a little patience may work to our advantage. It will eventually bring prices back down, and it may signal to some that we don’t really want them having all of our information; we can make our own decisions without AI’s help.

Don’t forget to take a read through other blogs, here, or visit my YouTube Page

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Do you really need that shiny new PC?

How did we get here?

That question is actually very easy to explain this time around.

With the focus on AI, and companies diverting their resources to the corporate customer instead of the consumer, pricing has soared. Specifically, anything with a memory component has seen a drastic increase almost overnight. In some cases, increases were more than 100%.

Data centers use a different type of memory than consumers, so you might not see a problem, but the big three are committing to more data center products and less consumer. Good for data centers, bad for us. A shortage of newer memory means people panic buy any memory they can get, driving the price of DDR4 up. We’ll discuss the issue for one company involved in a bit.

There are three major memory manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, with the latter recently saying they will drop their consumer effort completely. Crucial is a very popular and dependable brand, producing memory and storage, and now they are gone. That leaves two companies to produce the entire supply and they have already announced they are scaling back.

PC memory saw the most immediate effect, but pricing for everything that uses memory will increase. All solid state devices use some form of memory and now that will be in shorter supply with no end in sight. That means everything from TVs to mobile phones, and cameras to tablets get more expensive. Even if another company wanted to take advantage, factories don’t come online overnight.

The Biggest Loser? (Besides us)

There will be several, but one company that will suffer is AMD. This will be especially tough on them with the AM5 platform taking only DDR5. Any modern processor they make will be dependent on DDR5 and they are sure to see a downturn. Intel, and maybe even Qualcomm gain an advantage with some of their modern products using older memory.

Intel’s LGA 1170 socket has DDR4 version support available and Qualcomm has shown itself to be very adaptable. Their mobile sector may suffer, but their PC processors could have an advantage. AMD could save itself a bit though if they stretch the AM4 processors. It’s something they have done recently, and many of us thought it was a bit silly. It may be a genius move.

AMD has produced several new AM4 CPUs well after introducing AM5 and they have continued BIOS updates. It could be a great stop gap. It does not help their graphics division, though. Nor does it give high hopes for Intel continuing with the Celestial line of GPU, but that’s a different conversation.

So, what do we do?

The simplest answer for that is nothing. If you don’t need a new PC, don’t go shopping for a bit until thew market calms. If you do need a new PC, look at slightly older platforms like the AM4 or LGA 1170. Older generations are also a possibility, but you have to be mindful of the Windows 10 retirement. That’s a whole other story as well.

I have YouTube videos on using much older platforms, one of them here. I’ll also be writing and publishing videos on more current generations that will accept Windows 11. Don’t forget, Linux is also an option for your operating system instead of large corporations offer. Thank you Steam for pushing this to a higher level. If you would like to read my last effort discussing some older platforms, try this one.

I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, and of course, I’ll discuss it in the blogs.