Processor/Mobo Advice

Hey guys and gals.

I'm in the process of upgrading my Processor, Mobo and Ram but i'm a little hesitant due to the recent Socket 1155 Mobo's being recalled.

The problem i have is that over here in Old Blighty, i can still get hold of the socket 1155 boards and the Sandy Bridge chips quite easily. I WOULD like to think that if the products are still up for sale they would be okay but i know what our retailers are like.

I'm currently running with an E8400, GA-EP41-UD3L mobo and 4gb generic ddr2 ram so aware pretty much any upgrade to a i5/i7 and a decent mobo/ram will be a good thing but what would you do for the upgrade?


Chance the socket 1155 stuff or go for something else?



Just to guide you with your choices, i will be using this PSU for now as it's still relatively new and successfully powering a MSI GTX 480 so i'll trust it.

Cheers for any replies.

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That's the $64,000 question now. What to do now that Socket 1155 MBs have essentially been recalled (but not officially) and Socket 1156 MBs are in short supply because they stopped manufacturing them to make Socket 1155 MBs.

The problem with Socket 1155 are the four SATA II, 3.0Gb/s ports. You still have two SATA III, 6.0Gb/s ports that don't have the problem. Also some motherboards come with extra SATA ports via an add-on chip and there isn't a problem with those.

Oh, the problem is, according to the current guesstimate, about 5% of the P67/H67 chips will have glitchy SATA II ports when the chip gets hot or overvolted. It won't corrupt data but the error rate will increase cutting into the effective transfer rate until no "clean" data will be able to be transferred. Like I said, the problem isn't with the two SATA III, 6.0Gb/s ports.

Right now several online vendors aren't even offering the Socket 1155 CPUs or motherboards until motherboards with the "fixed" P67/H67 chipsets are out. Assuming you can find some, you can work around the problem if you are a one hard drive, one optical drive kind of user.

Other options are Socket 1156 is still around but the mid-range boards from the big names are hard to find. NewEgg was pushing their "Open Box" stock of those. There's AMD's Socket AM3, the higher end Phenom II X4 and X6 CPUs are priced competitively to Intel CPUs with the same overall performance. Then there's Intel's Socket 1366 which is a tad pricier since the lowest price CPU for that socket is just under $300.

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After your reply i decided to research some more. The ASUS mobo's that are still up for sale (P8P67 for an example) are going to be "okay" to use because of the amount of SATA ports it has. At least 4 of the 8 won't ever develop the fault due to a 3rd party providing the controller, not Intel. It's not ideal but i can work with that.

So just in case anyone else was having the same concerns, if you use less than 4 SATA devices you'll be fine with an ASUS board. A lot better than being stuck with two.

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CoH PvP SG = SuperUnion - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
CoV PvP VG = Disruption - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
Global = @Rent & @Rent.

Playgroup are all **** - Global Handle

i have a sandy bridge /1156 (msi) mobo. Microcenter sent me an email and when there is a soluition they will replace it -

but even then I am not worried - it supposidly only affects 10% and your sata might have performance degredation in three years?? In three years I will probably have had 2 new cpus/mobos but that is just me.

amd is another option and the 6 cores will probably last you a long time - but even they have a new cpu (bulldozer) coming out.

if cost is an option then I would get a 1090T combo and spend the money you save on a kick butt video card.

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get an AMD Processor and MOBO problem solved

I went with the 1090t OC'd to 3.8 GHz and an Asus Crosshair iv formula mobo. with a Radeon 5870 GPU I get 30 fps on Rikti ship raids with ultra settings maxed out.

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I think i have the GFX solution covered for now Fur nes. The GTX 580 isn't that much faster and certainly not faster enough to justify the cost.

I would prefer to stick with Intel really but i guess i could give AMD a consideration. Especially if i can't get hold of the 2600k instead of the 2600.

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CoH PvP SG = SuperUnion - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
CoV PvP VG = Disruption - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
Global = @Rent & @Rent.

Playgroup are all **** - Global Handle