Replacing a faulty motherboard

nome

I own a MSI K8N Neo4-F motherboard and I have had it with this thing. This is the third time it is having this same problem. Recently it has started freezing up a few seconds after I turn it on. I can still hear music playing from winamp and everything but the screen just freezes. I did some searching and it seems this tiny fan that's over the nforce4 chip stops working as well after a year or so. The chip then overheats and melts. I replaced the motherboard about 7 months ago because it was causing similar display problems (after replacing graphics card, didn't help). At the time I was still under warranty so I put the same motherboard in. Now I am no longer under warranty.

I'll like to buy another motherboard to replace this one. I'm kinda clueless when it comes to motherboards though. I'll need something that's compatible with all the other parts I have now. Can anyone give me a recommendation or at least tell me what specs I should be looking at? I guess I should look for socket 939, AMD, ATX, and nVidia but anything else?

jotate

If you know the processor you've got, you can find it on newegg.com and they'll give you suggestions of compatible motherboards.

vonPoonBurGer

That's a Socket 939 board with an Nforce 4 chipset. Here's the problem... You're going to have a hard time finding a quality replacement Socket 939 board, because a lot of places aren't stocking them anymore. New Egg only has three listed on their website currently, and none I'd recommend. If you can find an Asus A8N-E, I got several years out of one of those before its chipset fan started to make awful noises. Even then, the motherboard continued to work flawlessly until I got around to replacing that HSF with a fanless unit, and it's still chugging along now in a secondary system.

I suppose an overhaul of the guts (new mobo/cpu/ram) is out of the question? That would make more sense to me than spending premium dollars on a hard to find quality replacement part, or spending money on yet another MSI board. If a full upgrade isn't in the cards, what you might want to consider doing is trying another MSI board, but tear off the crappy northbridge cooler right out of the box, and replace it with a quality part. The tiny fans on those northbridge coolers are notorious for developing problems, so I usually try to find a motherboard with no fan on the northbridge, or I replace it with a sufficiently large fanless heatsink prior to installation.

nome

Would it be possible to get a new motherboard which is compatible with the parts I have now? I'm kinda short on money right now. It looks like my only other opinion would be to get the same MSI motherboard and replace the northbridge fan. I'm not really sure what part that is or how I would go about replacing it though. The current parts I have are

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 512MB DDR333 184-pin DIMM
Nvidia Geforce 6800GS PCIe