Upgrading my 'Titan Xenomorph' i3-530

Galadirith

Galadirith

Galadirith

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Joined
11 Mar 2013
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3
Hi everyone

I'm looking to upgrade my i3-530 'Titan Xenomorph' system that I bought over 3 years ago now. It been great, but their are now intermittent shutdown problems that i've traced to either the CPU or Mobo (look at how colourful it is :eek:).

I will be using it to play mmo's (exclusively Guild Wars 2 so not very taxing) and also video editing in Davinci Resolve and Adobe's Suite. I'll be holding on to some of the components

PSU: Corsair CX600 600W
Graphics: Gigabyte GTX 460 [GV-N460OC-1GI]
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Cooler: Akasa Venom CPU Cooler
Case: Antec 300​

I have a budget of about £450, and I would love some advise on my upgrade components


I don't plan to OC my system, so I'm very happy with the 4790, especially at that price.

I'm sort of torn between this mobo and the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard. Both seem almost identical in both features and layout; the Gaming 5 has the Killer Lan and enhanced audio components which I won't really need and the UD3H has the 2x Copper PCB Design, which could well just be a marketing gimmick, but maybe it does make a difference. I like gigabyte, they've always be reliable to me, and unless there's a killer feature of another manufactures mobo that I should definitely have then i'd like to stick with them.

I'll definitely be upgrading to an SSD as soon as possible and hopefully add a second better GPU but I want to focus on getting my desktop working stably first.

I really appreciate you taking the time to look, cheers everyone :D
 
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Thanks ExRayTed, I hadn't actually thought about that. However I guess my alternative would be a 'H' chip but as far as I'm aware H based boards can't split up a PCIEX16 slot, so in a dual card setup one of the cards would be limited to a PCIEX4 slot.

I guess its unlikely that bandwidth would be a massive issue, but I think it could be more of a concern for video editing and rendering than in gaming?
 
what motherboard and memory in the i3 setup?

shutdowns,as in no blue screens?

you might just need a voltage tweak
 
Cheers for the look Wazza. Well its

CPU: i3-530
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H
RAM: Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel​

mmmm, well it does just shuts down without BSOD, but I also get weird Graphics driver errors before shutdowns sometimes (and had the GPU tested, its not faulty) and also most of the time after shutdowns it refuses to turn on, no boot screen, just no power. To get it started again I usually have to unplug from the mains and just leave it for a period of time (and its not the PSU as has that tested too) (oh and I switched out the ram too so not that :D).

I'm taking a guess, but it sounds to me like a mobo capacitor is malfunctioning, which would mean replacing the mobo, and LGA1156 is long past its use-by date :D

Could a voltage tweak fix any of this?

The CPU was originally shipped @ 4.20GHz but since the problems I removed the OC as a first call, and after having cleared the BIOS with the jumper several times and several shutdowns later the OC settings disappeared from the BIOS, so I can't even reapply them as outlined here.
 
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