Resurrect or cannibalise?

[Devrij]

I built my other half a desktop out of my old bits, which she uses for her masters and general Web browsing (nothing particularly demanding). She also has a laptop.

A few weeks ago it just decided never to power on ever again. After some diagnosis I'm starting to suspect the mobo is gone (psu voltages are all fine). I would do a bit more testing before spending any money, but assuming I'm right, here are my options:

Spend £70 on an obsolete mobo (Z68 or Z77)

Tear it apart and sell it for parts.

Tear it apart and use the parts in other builds.

What's inside:

2500k that clocks to 4.5ghz
Z68 mobo (suspected dead, was a RMA replacement itself)
8gb ddr3
1tb HDD
250GB SSD
Bog standard ODD
Ancient xfx 5850
Superflower golden green 500w psu

All in an ancient ATX case.

None of it is of use in my main rig, but part of me wants to put it in an itx board and replace the newer i3 that's in my htpc (which paired with the 970 in there would make a passable sofa gaming machine)

Is it worth selling? Not sure if it'd even fetch £150 once postage was taken care of, but not sure what 2nd hand market is like for these parts these days.

Or do I just wait until I have some spare cash and find an old replacement mobo and get it back on its feet?

Or... And I like this one, do I upgrade my system and give her my 3770k system (she'd kill me)

 

[mistersprinkles]

Well, 2500K is outdated, but if overclocked, still a capable gamer. If your board is dead, tracking down a new one is going to be $$$ as these boards are very rare.
Now is a good time to upgrade. Look at Coffee Lake (due in a month) and Ryzen as possible options. You will need new CPU/MOBO/RAM (everything is DDR4 now) and you might consider replacing that nearly 7 year old power supply. I would.

Also your 5850 is slloooooooow by modern standards and is due for an upgrade. If playing @ 1080P consider a 580 or 1060, or if you want to game at 1440P look at a 1070/1080, or a 1080Ti for 4K.

Run Checkdisk and check the SMART stats on your drives before you reuse 'em. If healthy, recycle and reuse.

Seriously consider G-Sync monitors (or Freesync if you go AMD). Adaptive sync makes gaming so much better.

Cheers.

 

[Devrij]

Well, 2500K is outdated, but if overclocked, still a capable gamer. If your board is dead, tracking down a new one is going to be $$$ as these boards are very rare.
Now is a good time to upgrade. Look at Coffee Lake (due in a month) and Ryzen as possible options. You will need new CPU/MOBO/RAM (everything is DDR4 now) and you might consider replacing that nearly 7 year old power supply. I would.

Also your 5850 is slloooooooow by modern standards and is due for an upgrade. If playing @ 1080P consider a 580 or 1060, or if you want to game at 1440P look at a 1070/1080, or a 1080Ti for 4K.

Run Checkdisk and check the SMART stats on your drives before you reuse 'em. If healthy, recycle and reuse.

Seriously consider G-Sync monitors (or Freesync if you go AMD). Adaptive sync makes gaming so much better.

Cheers.

Thanks, that pc isn't a gaming rig, and the 5850 is just to provide a display, but yeah it's worth about a tenner at this point.

For her purposes the 2500k is more than enough. I guess I'm weighing up how much I'd get for that system if I sold the chip and ram, to see if it would make an upgrade for my system affordable.