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Please give advice on replacement motherboard
Could someone help me find a good replacement motherboard for the rest of my components?
This is a looong story...sorry in advance.
Here is what's going on. I had a motherboard die: MSI K9 SLI Platinum. Yeah it's a MUCH older board. A capacitor decided to start bulging, and I had everything setup how I liked it, so I found an exact replacement. Long story short, the board I found was used and was cheap. I put it all together with a new 550Watt PS and ran it for a few days. Everything seemed fine, then for no reason, the computer just shuts down....no warning...nothing. Power light on the front of the case is flashing and the only way I can restart the machine is by switching off the PSU and unplugging it, waiting till it discharges and then plug it back in.....and then it switched back on. I thought it was some overheating problem after doing some research. So I bought one of those pretty good Thermaltake SpinQ fans. I thought I had figured out the problem and maybe the mainboard was shutting down because of heat. A week ago, it decided to shut down in the middle of work....no warning. It wasn't hot at all. CPU was barely at 40c and the system was a few degrees warmer. So I cross this out. I check the BIOS on the MOBO and it's the last one they put out for this board. I found a bunch of threads on a forum talking about MSI boards and this shutting down for no reason problem. I didn't find a solution. Computer was acting fine....until today. Today it decided to act up like a red-headed step child. It shut down 4-5 times before I boot it in safe mode and backed up all my stuff. While in safe mode, it was fine. It didn't shut down or act up. I rebooted into windows and 17 seconds after (Event Viewer) it shut down again. Thinking I had some kind of weird stuff going on. I rebooted back into safe mode and started looking for some kind of sign. However when the power shuts down abruptly, there's nothing you can see here. I found some errors on Windows Indexing files being corrupt. At this point, after all was backed up, I wrote zeroes to the drive and reinstalled a clean Windows 7. 10 seconds into a fresh install in Normal mode and it shuts down again! I went BACK into safe mode...and it was stable.
To me this makes no sense at all. I would like to guess it was the power supply because it's not a name brand high power unit. But if it was the power supply...wouldn't it kill over in safe mode just the same? So at this point...I'm guessing it's the motherboard.
What I would like for you guys to do, is offer me some advice for a replacement motherboard. I don't have a ton of money to throw into this thing because eventually it will get left behind here when I move back to the states.
My system:
OS Windows 7 Ultimate CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+ Motherboard MSI K9 Platinum SLI_JUNK!Memory G-Skill PC2-6400 4GB Graphics Card(s) MSI GeForce 8800GTS OC X2 SLI Sound Card M-Audio Delta 1010 PCI Monitor(s) Displays 2X Acer 22" LDC Screen Resolution 1680X1050 Hard Drives 2X Hitachi SATA 500GB
Thanks in advance.