What LGA 1155 mobos are worthwhile nowadays?

[limerickey]

I've got a Core i5-3570k that has lived in a Gigabyte Z68 board for the past 3-or-so years. Tremendous performance... great machine. That rig has stopped booting, and as far as I can tell, it is a case of the Gigabyte Z68 boot loop problem that appears to be well known.

So, I think OK, time to replace the mobo. But there appear to be almost no LGA1155 boards available that are not refurbs available on the market. My local Microcenter has one H61 board that may or may not be compatible with the 22nm chip I've got. Newegg has almost nothing that is not a refurb. Is this platform just dead now? Why is there the flood of refurbs? If you were in my position, what would you do?

The question is whether to ebay the CPU for ~$120-150 and start fresh, or risk a refurb mobo and the attendant headaches. It looks like if I flog the chip for ~$150, I could get a Microcenter AMD 8320 bundle for not much out of pocket... is that a sensible thing to do?

 

[Charlie98]

Z68/77 mobos are still out there, but you are at the mercy of what's on sale at the time you are looking. Look at eBay as well, and a reputable seller, or even a decent refurb with a warranty. Your K-chip is still a decent performer (you didn't specify what you use it for, nor the rest of your system specs) so unless you just wanted to move to a modern platform, I would look for the used mobo.

On a side note, I don't know why you GB board would all of a sudden boot loop, are you sure it's not a Microsoft update gone bad? Are you able to update the BIOS with the new version, or drop it back? I never updated any of my GB boards to the U1C (UEFI) BIOS, I think I'm on F10 with my Z68 board.... never had a problem with boot loop.

 

[Burpo]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ECS-Intel-M...-M3-NEW-NIB-/361405357916?hash=item5425701f5c

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-Intel-...rds-/281805466296?hash=item419cea2ab8&vxp=mtr

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293

 

[limerickey]

This machine was my main desktop powerhouse machine. All the games I never get around to playing are on there, but the number crunching power most often got used for media encoding... videos pulled from the Tivo, audio editing, etc. There are a few Virtualbox VMs on there that got used for various purposes...

As to the boot loop issue, it was slowly creeping up on me. Maybe a year ago the machine would refuse to shut down fully when told to restart. Needed the PS switch flipped to get it to reboot. So I swapped out the PS, but the behavior continued. Then I swapped out the old ram (1x4GB Kingston) RAM for 2x4GB Corsair modules... and it started needing a few tries at booting before it would successfully spin up. Put the old memory back, but the behavior continued. So for the past 9 months or so, the machine has needed 5 or 10 minutes to get itself into a frame of mind that would proceed to boot. A week or so ago it went from 5-10 minutes to overnight. Now it has been allowed to try for close to 24 hours and gets to the BIOS splash screen once every 15 tries, but never manages to boot from there.

So you think the refurbs out there are worth checking out... will have a look at them on ebay and elsewhere... This is Ascendtech and Directron's main business, right? I recall them from last time I was shopping for system pieces.

 

[limerickey]

Thanks for the pointers, burpo!

 

[limerickey]

Thanks for the thoughts, everybody. I got myself an Asus H77 refurb board off of Amazon. Works like a charm. Didn't even need to reinstall Windows. Just added the new drivers and I'm off to the races. I guess the Gigabyte board lived a full life and got a year past its warranty, so I can't complain too much...