Tag: z97

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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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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.