MSI ATX Mini Motherboard compatibility with I5 9400F

Charpol

Charpol

Charpol

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Surrey
Hi,

Can anyone help answer a question please. My son has bought a second hand PC which comes with an MSI ATX Mini Motherboard. He is hoping to get better FPS by upgrading from the I5 4440 he has today to the I5 9400F. Can this be done and will it help the FPS. We are both not really techy!
 
No, I'm afraid not, they are different sockets. The highest upgrade is likely to be a 4770/4790 or the Xeon E3-12xx V3 equivalent (if bios support is available and the cooling is good enough)
 
Thanks so much for the advice. Should I suggest he perhaps considers an upgrade to his motherboard? I’ve seen an MSI Z490 gaming motherboard for sale, assuming he could upgrade to this and the upgrade to the I5 9400f? Any advice would be welcome, sadly my hardware knowledge is limited!
 
Charpol said:
Thanks so much for the advice. Should I suggest he perhaps considers an upgrade to his motherboard? I’ve seen an MSI Z490 gaming motherboard for sale, assuming he could upgrade to this and the upgrade to the I5 9400f? Any advice would be welcome, sadly my hardware knowledge is limited!
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What does "Mini" mean? Is it an ITX motherboard? Do you have the model name/number for the PC? Upgrading manufacturer-built PCs can be rather complicated, unfortunately, because there's a lot to check.

A Z490 motherboard is not compatible with an i5-9400F. Z490 is socket 1200 and was released with 10th gen CPUs (the i5-9400F is 9th gen), but they can support 11th gen CPUs with a BIOS update.

What game(s) is he trying to play? What is the graphics card and how much memory does the PC have?
 
I think it’s just a smaller motherboard. It says it’s an ATX mini. I don’t have the model name/number but having understood your comments around compatibility, we are now looking at upgrading the motherboard and CPU. The biggest challenge for my son FPS on games like Fortnite. Hoping if we upgrade both, this will help. Thanks again for all of your help, much appreciated!
 
Charpol said:
Hoping if we upgrade both, this will help.
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Maybe... but he might also be better with a GPU upgrade for fps games. But be aware that if you're taking an older motherboard out, the new one likely won't take the same RAM as the old (which I think was DDR3 and we're now onto DDR4 and DDR5).

CPU + motherboard + memory tends to be a holy trinity of upgrade when you're coming from more than a couple of years ago. And then you need to start thinking about your power supply wattage because new kit pulls more electricities... Short version, sometimes an older PC "is what it is" and attempts to upgrade chain off into building a whole new PC anyway.

It might be worth trying to get a good photo of the motherboard, showing whatever text it has. Same for the graphics card, even if you can only get a view of the side of it. Folks here are pretty good at identifying what you're looking at :)
 
Charpol said:
I think it’s just a smaller motherboard. It says it’s an ATX mini. I don’t have the model name/number but having understood your comments around compatibility, we are now looking at upgrading the motherboard and CPU. The biggest challenge for my son FPS on games like Fortnite. Hoping if we upgrade both, this will help. Thanks again for all of your help, much appreciated!
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An i5-4440, or the CPU upgrades I mentioned are quite capable of running Fortnite, a new CPU is not 'necessary' (though it does depend what FPS he considers an acceptable minimum).

What resolution and detail settings is he using?

As @eddiew said, a graphics card upgrade might be a better option here.

Without the model name/number (can you not get this from CPU-Z or hwinfo64?) I would not recommend trying to upgrade.

Pre-builds (especially small ones) can have proprietary parts, e.g. non-standard PSU and motherboard, that makes upgrading awkward. From my understanding of MSI, they're less inclined to do this than e.g. Dell, but you really need this information first. If you can't find it, then you can check the motherboard's screw placement and physically measure the board and count the number of pins on the power connectors. That will give you a clue what the motherboard format is and if the PSU is standard. You'd also need to check how much clearance there is for the CPU cooler because the existing cooler might not fit.

It would help if you could take a picture from hwinfo64 or CPU-Z showing us the whole system.
 
I’ve found the model which is a B85M-D2V Gigabyte Motherboard. Not sure the seller was very honest, when he said it was MSI and only a few years old!! Anyway, it is what it is. Based on this, what do you recommend? Once again, really appreciate the advice!
 
Charpol said:
I’ve found the model which is a B85M-D2V Gigabyte Motherboard. Not sure the seller was very honest, when he said it was MSI and only a few years old!! Anyway, it is what it is. Based on this, what do you recommend? Once again, really appreciate the advice!
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Aha, in that case, the system should be fully upgradeable.

Can you answer the other questions though, is important to knowing what to recommend.
 
Charpol said:
Not sure the seller was very honest, when he said it was MSI and only a few years old!!
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That CPU launched in 2013 so... no, no they weren't. I wouldn't call 9 years "a few". If it was a recent purchase, I'd consider whether you can push it back and say that it's not as advertised. If bought via a popular online auction side, there should be some good buyer protection in place for cases like this.

Still, it's not the worst thing in the world; 4 cpu cores at least. Paired with a 1660 GPU it should be pretty ok for Fortnite and similar at standard 1080p resolution. Again, worth trying to check that the graphics card is as you were told; when in doubt, post a photo here and people will try to help :)

...it's not just something silly like it needs the proper nvidia drivers? I've had problems in the past where Windows thinks it has downloaded and installed drivers, but it hasn't really, and it's chugging along at 10fps instead of 60.
 
I took a look and it is a 1660, so at least that was honest. CPU and graphics card are both maxed out at almost 100% utilisation, is this how it should be? I think the main challenge is that the FPS is unstable, one minute it’s fine and the next it drops off. Not being techy, this could be normal, I don’t know.
 
Charpol said:
I took a look and it is a 1660, so at least that was honest. CPU and graphics card are both maxed out at almost 100% utilisation, is this how it should be? I think the main challenge is that the FPS is unstable, one minute it’s fine and the next it drops off. Not being techy, this could be normal, I don’t know.
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I'd suggest running a benchmark like 3D Mark to check that everything is performing as expected.

It's hard to say if it's normal, we really need to know the settings he's using. As @eddiew said, 1080p should work fine, but if he's using 1440p and max settings then it will chug.
 
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