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August 28th, 2021

malada: Greenland flag (Default)
Saturday, August 28th, 2021 03:52 pm
Checked the power supply - it's good.

Swapped out Xeon CPU for the original i5-750. The box fails MEMTEST in exactly the same way. CPU probably not the problem.

Swapped RAM in and out until I discovered the box would boot with one and only one stick of RAM. Ran MEMTEST on all RAM sticks one by one - they're all good.

So it looks like I got a dying motherboard. It will run with only one stick installed but it's time for a replacement. I have 3 options:

Replace motherboard. This means finding a socket 1156 motherboard... which aren't new and aren't common. But I get to reuse everything else in my system.

Replace motherboard, CPU and RAM with new parts. I'm looking at an AMD 6 core 12 threads with at least 16 gigs of RAM. The power supply and disk drive and graphic card are good so that won't be too bad. This would be a much more expensive move - around 500 dollars. This would be a much needed upgrade but I'd *really* need to upgrade the case too as it only has front panel USB 2.0.

Last option - whole new machine. That's going to be pricey.

At the moment I'm slow walking this as I *have* a working system that's acceptable for most of what I do.

No need to rush with this one.

-m
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