Is it better to replace the motherboard or buy a new one?

[AidanJohns]

I have an Asus K5130-UK016S tower PC. 6GB RAM, 2.9GHz Quad Core CPU, plus an added GeForce 210. The motherboard on it broke, at least according to the person we took it to. They said it's not worth replacing the motherboard. However since we're on a low budget I'm wondering if it'd be more economical to get a professional to fix the motherboard and risk it not working, or to sell the parts and buy a new computer.
Any suggestions?

 

[fl0x]

It's a low end pc, if you are going to be gaming on it i would recommend selling this pc and adding a bit more money to get a good pc. If you're going to be using it for work etc. i would give it to repair if it costs $20 or less. If it costs more i'd say buy a new cheap one.

 

[boosted1g]

If it costs $20 to swap out a motherboard I would be highly skeptical about the skill of the person doing it.
Typically when a motherboard dies it is not reparable. There are some ports you can remove and solder in the replacement but this is the exception and not the rule, and you are talking $40 or more for a "zero guarantee" fix.

Some OEM towers are proprietary and will only accept their specific boards but your tower does not seem to be the case.

Your motherboard is a socket 1155 motheboard for sandy bridge and ivy bridge generation intel CPUs. Now this is an older generation board so finding it from a normal vendor (newegg, amazon, etc) will be more expensive so ebay would probably be your best bet:
This one should work: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Intel-DH67BL-DH67BLB3-BLKDH67BLB3-LGA-1155-Micro-ATX-OEM-Bulk-with-I-O/252160364987?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D888007%26algo%3DDISC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D38530%26meid%3Dbc053d29941642c1afb11ee1591e4963%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D2%26sd%3D152128439516
Then it is just a matter of finding a shop to swap it out. Time to do it properly would be 30-45 minutes. $40-50 would be what I would expect to pay (and what I would charge others) if the computer is brought to me and not doing an in-home service.

 

[brannsiu]

What is usually the cause of motherboard failure ? Inappropriate M/B screw ? Inappropriate motherboard standoff ？ too many dust that shorts out the circuit? Or anything otherwise ?

I also have the same problems the salesman said my motherboard couldn't recognize some hard drives correctly and some bridge problems , in fact I don't know what he said at all because I have little knowledge about hardware, I don't know if he can be trusted

 

[boosted1g]

It completely varies.
The most common thing to die is the integrated ethernet port but a $12 separate ethernet card will get you back up and running.
Outside of that the northbridge chip could go bad, the southbridge (includes sata chipset) could go bad, bios chip, ports, etc.
Physical damage to ports or CPU socket can happen.
Electrical surges can even damage the PCB.

As far as the cause the screws/standoffs is really a very very rare problem that you should only see in a small percent of amateur home-built systems. The chips going bad could be a lemon board model, or just a random fluke.

If there was anything most likely to damage a motherboard it would be a cheap power supply. Dell's power supplies are good, asus and HP are more then adequate for what they come with stock. The biggest danger is the cheap third party "gaming" power supplies sold online that cant handle half their stated wattage; when these die they typically take out at least the graphics card and the motherboard; there have been even a handful of cases of these causing serious house fires. These power supplies are the equivalent to a "2000w" no-name car stereo amp sold by a street vendor.