hello all my gaming ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3+ Motherboard motherboard died and i am thinking of upgrading 1)is it worth going from AMD to Intel? 2) if i uprgrade, should i get the i5 or the i7? 3)what are some good boards for under $160 i did find these boards that i like http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8041587&CatId=8586 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8139496&CatId=8586 lastly the symptoms if anyone wants to help me fix it fans(gpu cpu and case) run at full speed no video output i usually get a beep during P.O.S.T but i dont i can unplug the 4 pin atx power connecter and get the same symptoms. i have tried resetting cmos one ramstick in all slots 2 ramstick in all possible slots no gpu
i switched the graphics card. thats the only thing i did, i de-stactic myself. i have tried reseating it and puting the old one in, as well as cleaning the slot
i5 vs i7, I personally dont think its worth getting the i7 for a home user. For video output, you did move the monitors cable from motherboard to GPU output right? The lack of POST beep is worrying though. ASUS motherboards all have several status LED's spread around, you will have to consult the manual for which LED is in which location but 1 will light up to indicate which system is failing POST.
beep is for POST success, lack of beep indicates POST failure at which point you should be checking the mobo for the status lights.
i have 1 green led on my board, ill go check that right now. UPDATE all that LED does is tell me the board is gettng power. it doesnt flash any error signals. should i replace the cmos/bios battery? see if it is a dead battery?
CMOS battery wouldnt cause it to fail to boot. On a modern motherboard it only operate the RTC which will simply reset without any power (and causes your system time to be wrong), older motherboards would cause it to lose the BIOS settings as they were stored in volatile memory but modern motherboards use EEPROM or even flash storage which doesnt need power to retain its contents. Even on the old boards which would lose bios settings they had a ROM chip for factory default settings and they would fallback on that. Your assumption of the LED that is lit being for power is correct, ASUS use green for power and then usually blue or red for status and error lights. Very odd that there is no error light at all and it isn't passing POST. I honestly can't think why that would be
If you do end up needing to replace it, get this i5. BNG is one of the very few games that use hyperthreading, and 1 game isn't worth $70 IMO. http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx
ok guys. its final. im going to switch the motherboard out for a intel board. i am also going to buy a i5 processor. thanks for the help guys
If you want Intel with 4 cores I would get an i3 with hyper threading and save yourself some money. Get a board that will allow you to add an i7 later on. Or just get an i7 and be done. Just my thoughts.
i3 are dual core. Hyperthreading does close to nothing for gaming. It just simulates 4 cores, each core 2 threads, but that's it, there is no magical performance increase. For gaming an i5 is all you need. If you are doing video editing or stuff like that that uses all threads you might wanna consider an i7.
If the game, or any other software for that matter, is not optimized for multiple cores then yes, your statement is true. If the game, or any other software for that matter, is not optimized for multiple cores, why bother buying an i5? My point is, if you're going to upgrade, spend a few more dollars and get the best possible, in case your needs change in the future. If not then get only what you need I guess.
Hyperthreading pretty much just simulates having 2 isolated instruction pipelines per core. The speed gain can actually be negative in some scenarios. It is no substitute for true multi-core setups. Although most gamers won't actually need more than 4 cores anyway. Most games only seem to break down into 2 or 3 threads at most, 4 on a few. BeamNG is in a very small selection of software which can utilise more at 2 threads + 1 per vehicle. Throwing more threads at a problem is not guaranteed to make anything quicker, games simply don't need breaking down any further or they need breaking down so far that you end up with hundreds of threads and should be looking at GPGPU technologies instead.
Again, my point was less an argument for hyper threading than it was for getting the best processor you can afford at the time. I would just skip the i5 and go for an i7 if it was me. Again, just my thoughts. I didn't mean to spark a debate.
