Pop goes the CPU or motherboard

[13oots2]

Was happily watching the latest episode of Strange New Worlds, sudden lockup with a garbled screen. Rebooted and the post seemed to take an age, opened up the case to find a post code of 00 displayed on my ROG Strix X.299-E Gaming II, I guess either the poor 10980XE or mobo had expired due to years of abuse. I had an issue the other day with Windows 24H2 doing strange things to the processor, a couple of cores were being hammered doing simple tasks. Perhaps it was a failing motherboard or CPU that was the problem, guess I will never know now.

My PC is used for most my entertainment purposes, so emergency steps were taken using quite a limited budget, I had a decision to make about the RAM. I have 64gb of very nice Team Group 8 Pack 3600mHz, but it seemed pointless to buy into an old memory platform, also my system has a custom loop but couldn't afford an AM5 water block. My PSU is about 2 weeks old and the rest of my parts are perfectly usable, including an RTX3090, a RAID card with a lot of spinning rust. I will lose a 512gb NVME drive for now as the new motherboard only has 2 slots, can always buy and adapter in a week's time.
To get me up and running and have a bit of processing power I went with the following list, when I have a bit of money to throw at the system will upgrade as I go along.

AMD Ryzen 5 7600 (6C/12T @ 3.8GHz) AM5

Gigabyte B650 Eagle Motherboard

Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 6000MHz

Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE


Total including shipping £363.92, not the fastest system in the world, but should keep me doing the impossible, pulling my hair out in frustration.

 

[adrichardson81]

If you can find a Gigabyte x670 Aorus Elite AX, it'll give you 4 x4 m.2 slots (3 gen4, 1 gen5).

 

[13oots2]

If you can find a Gigabyte x670 Aorus Elite AX, it'll give you 4 x4 m.2 slots (3 gen4, 1 gen5).

Thanks for the suggestion, turns out the Gigabyte has the 3 slots I need, was on very tight budget and the motherboard was the max I could afford. Next day the Eagle AX was £10 cheaper, I still need to get a 2.5gb network card as the Eagle only has 1gb, CPU should arrive tomorrow and will get building.

Seems I got lucky with my water cooling, couldn't afford a CPU block at the time, I have an old Corsair Hydro X block, have just ordered new fittings for £15 that should fit. Can then send the Peerless Assassin 120 back for a refund, that will cover the network card.