[SOLVED] Please help me with finding out a motherboard replacement!!

[angurishu]

Hi! I'm replacing my motherboard as my current motherboard is broken, for reasons I'm unaware of unfortunately. I've tried looking around at all the choices but there so many alternatives and I would love it if someone could help me get a few good options!!

My current motherboard is an Asus Prime B250M-A, it's an older generation motherboard which supports intel 7th gen CPU's. I'm looking for a budget replacement around the same price as this! Which is around USD $80-$100. Even if it's a bit more expensive it's fine, please do let me know!

The annoying thing is that I need to know what part to get before a family member from abroad comes but I've still got no clue on figuring out which chipset and socket is the right one for me - if anyone could help me out here and give me some information I would be extremely grateful!!!

Here is the rest of my setup info, if it's important:

Intel i5 7400
8 GB RAM
RX 580 8GB
256 GB M.2 NVME SSD
1 TB HDD
450W PSU

I would love anyone's input, thank you ever so much!!!

 

[siaan312]

You need either
B150, B250, Z170 or Z270.
socket 1151.
Though I think if you have B150 or Z170 you'd need a bios update for the board.

 

[angurishu]

You need either
B150, B250, Z170 or Z270.
socket 1151.
Though I think if you have B150 or Z170 you'd need a bios update for the board.

Thank you for your response!! But I do have a question; how do you know that all those chipsets go into that specific socket? I'm not questioning you, I just don't know how it works -- is there like a naming scheme for these motherboard's chipsets and sockets? I would love to know so I could understand!

 

[punkncat]

Something I would mention in regard to this is, how are you sure that the motherboard is the only thing wrong? What symptoms and troubleshooting occurred to lead you to this conclusion?

 

[siaan312]

Thank you for your response!! But I do have a question; how do you know that all those chipsets go into that specific socket? I'm not questioning you, I just don't know how it works -- is there like a naming scheme for these motherboard's chipsets and sockets? I would love to know so I could understand!

A socket is attributed to some chipsets.
All those have the same socket

Buy say, a Z690 board will have a socket LGA1700.

Z370 and Z390 (and the B series of that generation) have a socket 1151v2. It is not the same.

 

[mdd1963]

the B250/Z270 will work, without question, assuming the CPU is good.

(I'd seriously consider throwing in another $100_$200 or whatever for jumping to a newer mainboard and CPU at this point, unless this i5-7400 in question is limited to strictly email and surfing, etc....)

Lots of good deals out there for 10600,11400 bundles, etc...

 

[angurishu]

Something I would mention in regard to this is, how are you sure that the motherboard is the only thing wrong? What symptoms and troubleshooting occurred to lead you to this conclusion?

Honestly that is the main problem... Since you've asked, let me explain to you what happened:

I usually service my pc once a year or two when I notice a decent loss in performance or certain issues, though quite frankly there's little to no good performance to begin with since the parts are old. I've had lots of issues with this pc but nothing I couldn't fix or possibly take to a technician to get fixed. One huge issue I've recently found out, by browsing this same forum, is that my PSU apparently is not enough to give enough power to my components all this time. Which makes sense since the majority of my ports in my PC don't function for no reason, even if the driver's were up to date, resulting in me buying a usb hub. But the point is, this pc has had hiccups and issues for a while.

So on March 17th, I was using my pc, talking to my girlfriend on discord and watching a stream of her playing some game for me. Whilst I was doing this, I was organizing my uni files and I've had this application called teracopy, which was on my pc for around two years now, giving me issues whenever I tried to copy a file to any location. It said some sort of access violation or something of the sort though honestly I can't remember properly anymore, I apologize!! But the thing is it never gave me any issues but these popups start coming up for the past two days every time I copied a file. I was quite irked with it so I thought the best course of action would be to reinstall the application to fix it, and that's what I did. I went to uninstall it and while it was uninstalling in the little uninstalling box, it said "gathering require information" and afterwards the uninstallation crashed? It gave me an option to cancel, which I clicked. But when I did that, my whole windows went to a black screen, I couldn't press anything, my windows button didn't work, nothing worked except my current open applications. Here's a screenshot of it. You can see my sticky notes and discord app opened but my wallpaper, my task bar is all gone.

Afterwards I panicked and I tried to restart my pc, but when I start the pc, there would be no signal coming from my gpu for some reason. It wouldn't even show the bios screen because it didn't give any video signal. So I tried the following things:

1. Reseating the GPU
2. Reseating the RAM after blowing on it for a bit in case there were dust
3. Reseating the cmos battery
4. Removing the sata cable for my secondary drive

None of these worked. So I called in a technician. he was confused as well as I was, but what he did was he removed the GPU, plugged the hdmi into the the motherboards hdmi socket, and it gave us a display for once!! We could go into the bios, but when it tries to load into windows, there's a circle that keeps spinning indefinitely and stops. He and I both thought that my boot drive (SSD) was being faulty so he formatted it and plugged in a usb with the windows OS installation and reinstalled a brand new windows OS into my boot drive to see if it'll fix anything, but it didn't, it gave the same issue, and my secondary drive wasnt plugged in at all at this stage btw!! So because of that we were stumped. He tried installing a brand new version or Windows into one of his new hard drives and tried to boot into it by changing the boot order in the bios and it's still spinning indefinitely and gets stuck. Which is why he concluded it's a motherboard issue! It really really doesn't make sense to me tho... But I figure these parts are old so maybe that's why?

I apologize if this is all a jumble and doesn't make sense but I tried my best to give a good reaccounting so you could understand what happened!! If theres any clarification please do let me know because more than buying a new part I'd rather fix this bc my family is not doing good financially unfortunately!!!

Thank you for reading it all if you did!

 

[angurishu]

the B250/Z270 will work, without question, assuming the CPU is good.

(I'd seriously consider throwing in another $100_$200 or whatever for jumping to a newer mainboard and CPU at this point, unless this i5-7400 in question is limited to strictly email and surfing, etc....)

Lots of good deals out there for 10600,11400 bundles, etc...

Honestly, I know!!! How I wish I could go for those parts!! Because even the budget options as of now are better than what I have tenfold!! I use the i5 for playing games like overwatch or apex as well, though I've always suffered from lag but I've gotten used to it! Regardless, since I'm prioritizing my uni work more than gaming right now, all I needed from it was to work. It's honestly depressing since this pc is all I have. I just need a replacement since I have all my important data in my secondary drive with no way to access it. So I really need to find a way to get this thing to work. But thanks for letting me know and reminding me regarding those bundles, I'm definitely going to save money one day to get better parts as such!! I appreciate it!!

 

[angurishu]

A socket is attributed to some chipsets.
All those have the same socket

Buy say, a Z690 board will have a socket LGA1700.

Z370 and Z390 (and the B series of that generation) have a socket 1151v2. It is not the same.

Yeah I've researched a bit more and I sort of understand now, mostly because of pcpartpicker and it's filters lol but now I know what to search for: B250 boards with the LGA 1151 socket!! Thanks ever so much for guiding me in the right way!!

 

[KyaraM]

Honestly, I know!!! How I wish I could go for those parts!! Because even the budget options as of now are better than what I have tenfold!! I use the i5 for playing games like overwatch or apex as well, though I've always suffered from lag but I've gotten used to it! Regardless, since I'm prioritizing my uni work more than gaming right now, all I needed from it was to work. It's honestly depressing since this pc is all I have. I just need a replacement since I have all my important data in my secondary drive with no way to access it. So I really need to find a way to get this thing to work. But thanks for letting me know and reminding me regarding those bundles, I'm definitely going to save money one day to get better parts as such!! I appreciate it!!

What is your current budget? And what country? I think, depending on where you are and if it's available, an i3-12100 and a H610 board would be a good upgrade for you. Should cost around 200 bucks. If that's within the budget you can afford. What PSU are we talking, btw? That could be culprit of the damage and might take out something else if things go south...

 

[angurishu]

What is your current budget? And what country? I think, depending on where you are and if it's available, an i3-12100 and a H610 board would be a good upgrade for you. Should cost around 200 bucks. If that's within the budget you can afford. What PSU are we talking, btw? That could be culprit of the damage and might take out something else if things go south...

Honestly I don't have a budget at all, that's how bad my family's financial position is qwq. Anyways, I'm in Sri Lanka right now and regarding the PSU I have, apparently it's a "FSP Hexa+ 450w". I use a UPS tho since this country is prone to getting brownouts and power surges, it happens frequently, hence the UPS. But I believe the power just isn't enough for the most part, I think that's why I had issues with my pc with usb ports not working and whatnot! And I looked into your recommendations and good god the performance of those components as opposed my current stuff are crazy... and mine cost much more too!! I'm baffled honestly hahah. I'll be writing these down and saving them for the future, I appreciate it so much friend!!

 

[KyaraM]

Honestly I don't have a budget at all, that's how bad my family's financial position is qwq. Anyways, I'm in Sri Lanka right now and regarding the PSU I have, apparently it's a "FSP Hexa+ 450w". I use a UPS tho since this country is prone to getting brownouts and power surges, it happens frequently, hence the UPS. But I believe the power just isn't enough for the most part, I think that's why I had issues with my pc with usb ports not working and whatnot! And I looked into your recommendations and good god the performance of those components as opposed my current stuff are crazy... and mine cost much more too!! I'm baffled honestly hahah. I'll be writing these down and saving them for the future, I appreciate it so much friend!!

Wow, I never even heard of that PSU. By nominal capacity, it actually should be fine, even if a bit on the lower end; but a no-name part, especially when older, is always a risk factor and truly might be the reason. They can be unreliable/not deliver what they nominally can. I get that it can be hard to get something decent for you, though.

Computer parts made great strides the past couple years, especially on AMDs side, but Alder Lake really is an awesome Intel generation. Really looking forward to seeing where this headed myself, though I expect to be good in rhat regard for a few years, haha. I really hope you get what you need, though!

 

[angurishu]

Wow, I never even heard of that PSU. By nominal capacity, it actually should be fine, even if a bit on the lower end; but a no-name part, especially when older, is always a risk factor and truly might be the reason. They can be unreliable/not deliver what they nominally can. I get that it can be hard to get something decent for you, though.

Computer parts made great strides the past couple years, especially on AMDs side, but Alder Lake really is an awesome Intel generation. Really looking forward to seeing where this headed myself, though I expect to be good in that regard for a few years, haha. I really hope you get what you need, though!

Yeah I've never heard of it either hahaha, I literally had to remove the casing on my pc to figure out what it was since you asked!! The problem was that at the time when I bought this pc, I was around 14 or 15 and I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. Its a prebuilt and it had a good gpu in it so I just begged my mom for like 2 years to get it and didn't do any research for PC's because I saw good gpu my brain just went monke lol, so you could say that these are the consequences I'm facing for being ignorant.

And yes, you're right that in nominal capacity it should work fine, and it does, but apparently it's always better to go 100 or maybe even 200 watts higher than what is right for your pc?? I saw that on a thread somewhere here and I honestly agree with it even tho I'm not an expert or know much about PC's in general, but considering the issues I've been having with lack of power in ports, I think it's better to do that, or maybe my psu is just not good at all lol!! Regardless tho, I'm just glad there's so many budget options available now that has amazing price to performance, really stoked to save money some day and get a good pc!!! All in all thanks for your response, I appreciate it and I enjoy reading it, thank you!

 

[KyaraM]

Yeah I've never heard of it either hahaha, I literally had to remove the casing on my pc to figure out what it was since you asked!! The problem was that at the time when I bought this pc, I was around 14 or 15 and I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. Its a prebuilt and it had a good gpu in it so I just begged my mom for like 2 years to get it and didn't do any research for PC's because I saw good gpu my brain just went monke lol, so you could say that these are the consequences I'm facing for being ignorant.

And yes, you're right that in nominal capacity it should work fine, and it does, but apparently it's always better to go 100 or maybe even 200 watts higher than what is right for your pc?? I saw that on a thread somewhere here and I honestly agree with it even tho I'm not an expert or know much about PC's in general, but considering the issues I've been having with lack of power in ports, I think it's better to do that, or maybe my psu is just not good at all lol!! Regardless tho, I'm just glad there's so many budget options available now that has amazing price to performance, really stoked to save money some day and get a good pc!!! All in all thanks for your response, I appreciate it and I enjoy reading it, thank you!

Personally, I always managed really well with GPU vendor recommendations. My 3070Ti has a recommendation of 750W, and that's what my PSU is certified for. However, it's a BeQuiet! Pure Power 11, and those are really good. They keep what they promise. BeQuiet! also lists this one as as being suitable for the GPU. To fair, though, I originally wanted to run a 2070 non-Ti with lower power requirements. Plus, both CPU and GPU are undervolted, further keeping power draw (and heat) in check. So I don't expect any issues, and so far I encountered none. Plus, my old PC also uses a BeQuiet! PSU, for 5 years now, at GPU recommendation, and no issue there, either.

Btw, I did find your PSU brand in the tier list. That company actually has some decent options. Unfortunately, yours swems to be rated as "iGPU system only"...

 

[punkncat]

@angurishu , given the variety of possibilities that could be, I would highly suggest skipping the "replacement" motherboard and go with a new CPU/mobo combo. A new i3 even of the more readily found 10th gen variants will trounce that 7th gen i5. You should be able to utilize your RAM and storage.

As to your PSU, a quality 450W unit would be sufficient to power your system and GPU. If it is an old and lower end unit, would probably replace it with something suitable to future upgrade possibilities.

I would not spend a lot of time and money chasing this issue unless you happen to have a connection with extra parts that are compatible to 7th gen. You might buy a mobo and be in the same boat again.

 

[angurishu]

Personally, I always managed really well with GPU vendor recommendations. My 3070Ti has a recommendation of 750W, and that's what my PSU is certified for. However, it's a BeQuiet! Pure Power 11, and those are really good. They keep what they promise. BeQuiet! also lists this one as as being suitable for the GPU. To fair, though, I originally wanted to run a 2070 non-Ti with lower power requirements. Plus, both CPU and GPU are undervolted, further keeping power draw (and heat) in check. So I don't expect any issues, and so far I encountered none. Plus, my old PC also uses a BeQuiet! PSU, for 5 years now, at GPU recommendation, and no issue there, either.

Btw, I did find your PSU brand in the tier list. That company actually has some decent options. Unfortunately, yours swems to be rated as "iGPU system only"...

Oh really? iGPU?? Then I suppose the PSU thats in my prebuilt is just not up to standard at all, ohmygod qwq. Sigh, the more I research, the more upset I am at myself for not building a pc myself!! Thank you for letting me know this, Kyara. I've been focusing on motherboards and CPU's the whole day, but I should give attention into finding a well performing budget PSU as well so I can know what to go for in the future. Thank you for letting me know this!!

 

[angurishu]

@angurishu , given the variety of possibilities that could be, I would highly suggest skipping the "replacement" motherboard and go with a new CPU/mobo combo. A new i3 even of the more readily found 10th gen variants will trounce that 7th gen i5. You should be able to utilize your RAM and storage.

As to your PSU, a quality 450W unit would be sufficient to power your system and GPU. If it is an old and lower end unit, would probably replace it with something suitable to future upgrade possibilities.

I would not spend a lot of time and money chasing this issue unless you happen to have a connection with extra parts that are compatible to 7th gen. You might buy a mobo and be in the same boat again.

I agree with you 100%, I've been looking into an i3 12100F, as @KyaraM suggested, alongside a Gigabyte B660M DS3H and it's simply amazing for it's price. I do think it's better going for these new parts as they're in stock in my country, which is honestly something you can't find easily in Sri Lanka when it comes to pc components like this from my experience. And regarding the replacement, I have no connections whatsoever, my current (broken) setup is just a standalone motherboard and cpu. The reason I needed to find a replacement was because buying a replacement would be less costly than buying a new CPU and motherboard, however, after reading what you said and researching, I reckon it would be a waste of money to buy a replacement instead of those new components when looking at things in the long term...

Maybe for now I think it's best I find some scrap laptop to get my uni work done so I can get all caught up with my lectures, since doing work on phone is tedious, and then, hopefully, be able to save money for these new components, the i3 12100F and the corresponding motherboard.

I do have a question tho; how would one keep up with information pertaining to these pc components and know which are the best budget options and whatnot? I've gotten a recommendation from Kyara, and I think it's amazing. If it weren't for all of the lovely people who replied to my thread, I'd still be at a loss!! I (would and do) appreciate the feedback and advice!!

 

[punkncat]

how would one keep up with information pertaining to these pc components and know which are the best budget options and whatnot?

You are already in a good place for it. Some of the users here are astounding at offering parts lists with great value.

It would be hard for me to give recommendation that would be valid for your regions market. Personally like to follow quite a few of the tech channels on YouTube, a bit of reading, follow reviews, such as that. Sometimes take a virtual trip window shopping in your local vendors site and see what various builds cost.