Upgrade motherboard

PhoenixJ75 · 10 Sep 2023 at 23:20

I have a Model Z170X-Gaming 3 (U3E1) motherboard currently and am looking to a get a good gaming motherboard. Any suggest has to be low in price. Was looking at MSI MAG B660M but was wondering wherever it could take my oldish i7 chip or would I need to get a chip?

Tetras · 11 Sep 2023 at 03:41

PhoenixJ75 said:
Was looking at MSI MAG B660M but was wondering wherever it could take my oldish i7 chip

No chance at all.

pastymuncher · 11 Sep 2023 at 10:23

It's a completely different socket so not only would you be replacing the motherboard but also the cpu and also the memory if you went down the DDR5 route. Why do you want to upgrade the motherboard? If it's just to get a better board then motherboard upgrades are largely a waste of time as they give little or no performance gain. This is why it's especially important to pick a decent board in the first place. If your board is faulty the easiest thing to do would be to try and find a identical board, probably second hand as that socket was discontinued several years ago. If it's working fine then the best thing you could do is save up for a complete platform change which isn't going to be cheap these days.

mattyfez · 12 Sep 2023 at 07:31

As above, there is no point swapping the motherboard out. The z170 is the gaming/enthusiast chipset for that cpu socket anyway.