Socket 775 mobo issues

Maver1ck666 · 7 Feb 2012 at 12:21

I have an old MSI P7N Diamond mobo with an Intel Q6600 cpu. I've been having problems lately where the system just randomly reboots itself regardless of what I am doing. On investigation, it looks like my southbridge is damaged as on boot, it's sitting at 60 degrees and quite often goes into the 70's. When playing BF3 I've noticed this hit 75.

So this is my question to you. I can't afford to replace my cpu and everything else and appreciate that socket 775 chipsets are old now but what would be my best option? I'm hoping that I can just replace my mobo but not sure with what.

I currently have a BFG GTX 275 but would like the option to SLi them if I ever get another and have 4gb of PC6400 ram (I think its DDR2).

Thanks in advance for you help!

cmndr_andi · 7 Feb 2012 at 12:32

Hi there,

I am assuming that the board is now out of its warranty period, so you could have a go at fixing it yourself. If you are willing to go down this route then the first thing to do would be to disconnect the large motherboard heatsink from the board, clean the chips and heatsink contact surfaces, apply new thermal paste and then re-attach the heatsink. With any luck this will solve your chipset overheating issue (also adding a small fan like an antec spotcool to blow on the main heatsink fin area may also help).

However, the simplest fix would be to buy a new s775 board second hand. The best chipset to go for is the Intel P45 - which is a really excellent chipset and these boards often use the same southbridge as the Intel X58 boards, so good quality stuff. Of all the P45 boards the ones to look out for are the ASUS P5Q series, these are the ones I would go for and regularly sell for less than £50:

P5Q-E
P5Q Pro
P5Q Premium
P5Q Deluxe
P5Q Pro Turbo

With one of these boards you can expect good board temperatures and very nice overclocking (many of these will hit 500MHz FSB). However, like all intel chipset boards of this generation they don't officially support SLI - the only boards that officially do are the Nvidia chipset boards (like yours) but unfortunately these are all pants and not worth buying.

Instead I would go with the P45 board and try hacking SLI using this if you really want to add a second nvidia GPU.

Maver1ck666 · 7 Feb 2012 at 12:39

Yeah it is unfortunately.

I've stripped off the entire heatsink and re-applied themral comp to the chips. It did make a hell of a difference but not completely fix the problem. When I got the SB off, it looked like the original compound hadn't been applied properly as a corner of the chip wasn't covered. I also stuck a fan over the SB.

It's strange because sometimes it will just reboot when loading a game but then it will let me load it straight way and I can be good for hours before it will randomly do it again.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will have a look as the ASUS boards.

Ben

Maver1ck666 · 7 Feb 2012 at 18:12

So out of those boards above, what would you say was the best option if available?

cmndr_andi · 7 Feb 2012 at 18:18

The best would probably be the P5Q Deluxe - that used to be the top-end board and it is quality through and through.

However, it is really all to do with availability and price these days since these boards stopped being sold new a long time ago. Any of the boards I listed above would make for a really nice match with a Q6600 CPU -so cast the net out wide and see what you pull in.