Fried Mobo so I'm rebuilding my system along with some salvaged parts.

thedonquixotic

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Long story short, my ancient mobo died after recently purchasing a new PSU and GPU (in an ironic attempt to stave off having to buy a new mobo), so I'm looking to do a full upgrade, while still retaining some important parts of my previous arsenal.

Here's what I've already got:
1 900w Antec ATX PSU
1 Geforce 650 TI 2gb gpu
1 PCI-Express x1 wireless adapter
2 internal SATA HDD
1 Case of an unknown size (I think it's an ATX form factor, and it fits a 12x8.3 motherboard) with a broken case fan (i'd get a new case if I could find an ultra simple minimalist alternative for really really cheap)

And what I'm looking to get:
1 MSI Z77A-G41 (it doesn't have as many usb as I'd like but it's cheap.)
1 Intel Core i3-3220
2x4gb DDR3 1333mhz RAM (note all links are to Frys.com because I want to be able to just pick it up from their store tomorrow, instead of having to wait around for stuff to come in the mail)
Does this seem like a good build?
Also I was wondering if I took an old 9800 GTX+ card and put it in the PCI express 2 slot, and the 650 TI in the PCI Express 3 slot, if they'd run well together?
 

bkoop

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Also I was wondering if I took an old 9800 GTX+ card and put it in the PCI express 2 slot, and the 650 TI in the PCI Express 3 slot, if they'd run well together?

They will not run in SLI, you can use the 9800 GTX+ card as a dedicated PhysX card or to support a 3rd monitor, but it might slow down the GTX 650 Ti.
 

thedonquixotic

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When I looked up this possibility, I read that running two unlike cards required knocking down their two different memories to the lower level. Thats for SLI though I believe, so if I were to not run the GTX+ as a dedicated Physx card, that could make it slower, but how? Looking around, it seems that having a dedicated card at worst adds extra heat, or uses a card that could be better off being sold, but since this card is now pretty much obsolete, it seems having it along for the ride wouldn't hurt. Heat hasn't been a problem so far with this build.


Also does the rest of the build look okay?
 

thedonquixotic

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The z77 isn't that expensive, it's only 80 bucks after rebate. As to the i3, I'm just going off Tom's recommendation for the July CPU hierarchy. I want to spend about 120 bucks and they rate that as the best cpu for that price. A friend of mine said go i5 but I would think the Tom's benchmarks are the thing to follow. According to the chart, it's a 2nd tier cpu, and better than a couple i5. Is that a bad idea?

Upon more research I see why the GTX+ might be a bad idea. I might as well try it, since I'm not going to get much money for it at this point, but you guys are probably right.
 

thedonquixotic

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Awesome, thanks for the info. I'll get that i5 and go with the 1600mghz RAM. I was unsure what difference the hz would make since this is only my second time doing a big upgrade. Thanks!

I think I'm ready to go buy stuff. Thank you guys for your help. If there's any last things I should know, chime in, but you guys have already helped quite a bit.
 

thedonquixotic

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Okay so I got the parts,and the hardware part went fine, but I've run into a new problem. I know this is a bit of a newbie issue, but I didn't realize that changing my motherboard was going to cause a problem for Windows 7 to load up.

I have no optical driver to install the new motherboard drivers from. I've got it working, running off a Ubuntu USB drive, but I can not access my HDD or windows (exFat). I've downloaded the new MSI drivers to the flash drive, but I'm not sure how to install them. From the bios? Or what? I know generally, changing mobo means doing a clean install (at least now I know), but I can't do a clean install yet because the HDDs have a lot of important files on them.

I think I have a couple of options.

Somehow install the drivers from the usb (I hear that's possible) http://superuser.com/questions/422743/how-can-i-get-a-motherboard-driver-on-my-new-computer-without-an-optical-drive

I can get a pendrive Linux distro that reads exFat, and transfer all my important files off the HDDs and then do a clean install on them.

Any other options or ideas? Maybe I should take this to a different forum section, since it's a new problem, but let me know if you guys have any suggestions. Thank you for all the help.

 

thedonquixotic

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Cool, thanks!

Ummm... also I tried booting into safemode and it had the same problem as before. So is that a bad sign? The drives show up fine in the BIOS, so they should be fine I would think.

According to the MSI BIOS I can update the drivers, but I need their Linux based OS Winki 3 to do so, but I can't find anywhere online to download that. Is it still possible to update the drivers without doing a complete clean install?
 

thedonquixotic

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Hey guys, thanks for all the help, just wanted to let you know that everything was up and running. I ended up getting an optical drive just because I figured it might be easier, and using that was able to access the Winki 3 OS that the MSI mobo comes with. It's exfat capable, so used that to transfer everything over to my external, and from there was able to do a clean install.

The new parts sure are zippy, it also probably helps that this is a clean install (I know you're supposed to do that yearly but I rarely do). Thank you for all the help!
 

thedonquixotic

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That's what I generally do, but a friend told me otherwise. I'm a bit laissez faire with computer maintenance, so I figured he was probably doing the normal thing, though maybe he's just being anal hahaha