The prices of x79 boards are insane!!!

[HumblePie]

So I had a friend recently ask me to help him with some issues he is having with his PC. First he wants to upgrade a bit, and second he has had lots of strange issues even with a fresh install of windows 10. Problem is, he has an older Alienware dell computer with a i7 3820 processor in it. Of which it is having what seems to be some driver issues with windows 10. Not only that, it is having some issues with the ram upgrade he bought as well. He was hoping to get some more performance for gaming by upgrading the ram with more and faster speeds, and tossing anewer GPU in there. He picked up a 1060 6GB card to use. But it's all a mess and not working right. Basically I told him the most likely culprit is that proprietary POS dell motherboard.

So we went looking for a decent x79 motherboard he could swap in instead. Holy hell the prices on those are INSANE!!! $500+ on practically everyone that isn't a bone stock intel board. I know these boards aren't being made anymore, but I wasn't expecting this huge of a price increase for those boards.

Since I couldn't find a good price on anything to give him a better board with some overclocking room to work with, I basically told him to do a rebuild from scratch. My suggestion to him is that it would be cheaper with a whole new latest built, and just give that POS alienware to his daughter instead for now who has an even worse PC.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I was about ready to call your bluff, but ebay does indeed have mostly expensive hits for this board. I guess it's in that grey area of 'good enough performance to demand money' but 'low enough supply to demand price'. TBH i'd just splurge a bit at this point and do a skylake build. I5, decent board ($100-$125, and 16GB of memory) will only set you back what, 400-500? Might as well just do that.

 

[dtgoodwin]

I think the issue is that eBay was flooded with cheap, 10-core Xeon processors that were pulled from Facebook servers. They are compatible in x79 boards. It was an easy way to get a powerful system, at the cost of IPC and sheer MHz. There were a lot more processors available than motherboards.

 

[HumblePie]

I think the issue is that eBay was flooded with cheap, 10-core Xeon processors that were pulled from Facebook servers. They are compatible in x79 boards. It was an easy way to get a powerful system, at the cost of IPC and sheer MHz. There were a lot more processors available than motherboards.

Hrmm. Maybe, I don't remember the prices on those boards being that high before at all. I did a quick historical search and they've been high for a bit. Anything on ebay, amazon used, or any online forum selling them (including the for/sale forum on these boards) has the prices at insane rates. No way in hell would I spend $500+ on an x79 board when I can get better performance for the money with newer stuff.

 

[Raduque]

They didn't get high till the Xeons dropped. I mean, $75 for an 8-core/16-thread monster chip that works on a consumer board? I paid a little over $280 for a board and chip, at the time it was the best deal.

 

[HumblePie]

Would have thought by now the prices would have started to down trend after that initial surge, but I guess not.

 

[Raduque]

They're getting harder to find. There's still 10s of thousands of chips out there, though.

 

[tengen]

The processors are outliving the motherboards, so the mobos are definitely in demand.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I made a small fortune refurbing and selling X58 mobos.
Should have stocked up on X79s when they were new

 

[Justinbaileyman]

I ran into this over price issue as well when piecing together my builds. You know how I got around it? I went and got a Single Socket Server Board. They are fairly cheap and have mostly all the same functions as an x79 motherboard. If you buy the right boards you can even do some overclocking on the memory and cpu's better then what the x79 chipset lets you do.

 

[HumblePie]

I ran into this over price issue as well when piecing together my builds. You know how I got around it? I went and got a Single Socket Server Board. They are fairly cheap and have mostly all the same functions as an x79 motherboard. If you buy the right boards you can even do some overclocking on the memory and cpu's better then what the x79 chipset lets you do.

any suggestions?

 

[Justinbaileyman]

This one seems really good

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7523&cm_re=Asrock_c602-_-13-157-523-_-Product

 

[HumblePie]

This one seems really good

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7523&cm_re=Asrock_c602-_-13-157-523-_-Product

Not exactly cheap but cheaper than 500

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Its not cheap but it will be brand new and have a warranty should anything go wrong and since its not on the x79 chip set your not going to run into the problem of sata and USB ports dropping drives like most of the x79 motherboards run into sooner or later. I have this motherboard right now and have been running it for about 2 months straight and not have had a single issue. Now on the other hand I have gone through at least a dozen x79 motherboards ranging from Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte and everyone of them sprouted up issues between 1 and 6 months of use. The last Motherboard I had was the Intel DX79SR X79 motherboard running a E5-2670 8c/16t. I got it brand new factory sealed and less then a week in it started dropping drives till eventually it wouldn't read drives at all. Then one morning I powered on the unit and the darn thing started on fire and exploded. I didnt even know motherboards could explode. Luckily and I do mean luck nothing else but the motherboard was damaged.Still got the same CPU I was using in that build in my current build and she is a monster that cant be killed LOL. I know I am one of those rare cases and not all x79 boards are bad but they do have a hugely high failure rate and just wanted to share what I've been through. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy and god only know what would have happened if I wasn't home that day. It could have burned my house down