Motherboard advice

[Dave202]

Hello, about four years ago I bought a decent PC, since then I've replaced everything except the motherboard and the processor. The last upgrade was switching from Samsung RAM to Kingston RAM around 6 months ago. Everything had been working fine until last week when the PC just started restarting by itself.

I kept getting "TRAP 00000010" errors on screen after an unexpected restart, which, after looking up turns out to be a RAM problem. One of my old sticks of RAM still worked as only one was faulty (I decided to replace both anyway with said Kingston RAM) so I tried that. Still no joy. Was still getting 2-3 restarts per day, until today when I had 3 in the space of 10 minutes, and after that the PC would not work at all.

It would turn on, but would not load or beep, the screen just stays black. I took the motherboard out onto a rubber mat to see if that was the problem, still no joy so I'm guessing I have to replace my motherboard.

This is where I need help. My motherboard is an ECS EliteGroup P4M800-M7 - rubbish I know - and when I decided to upgrade my graphics card, there was only one option, the ATI Radeon HD3850 AGP. Are there any better mobos out there that supports this graphics card and my 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor? And possibly more room for more RAM, or am I out of luck?

Here are my hardware specs:

2 x 1 Kingston 1GB RAM (http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3274805/Kingston-KVR400X64C3A-1G-Valueram-Computer-Memory-1GB-PC3200-DDR-400MHz-184-Pin/Product.html)

ATI Radeon HD3850 AGP Graphics Card

3GHz Intel Pentium 4 (Socket LGA775 - no idea if this is of any help)

620W Corsair PSU

Elitegroup P4M800-M7 (http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Elitegroup-ECS-P4M800-M7-SOCKET-775-ALL-IN-ONE-UATX-MOTHERBOARD)


Thanks in advance.

 

[geofelt]

Love the psu, and not much else.
I would plan on a new build; not much value in throwing more money at an old sytem when we reallly don't know what the problem is.

 

[Dave202]

Haha yeah, back in the day it was an alright PC, bar the old graphics card. With that Radeon 3850 my FPS on World of Warcraft went from 10-15FPS to 60+ lol - it's still a pretty fast PC.

Unfortunately, I don't have the resources for a whole new system.

I'm not worried if the next best motherboard is cheap or anything (or the same as this one).

 

[Dave202]

Shameless bump.

 

[pat]

It might be failing capacitors on the motherboard. Just look at them. They should have a flat and clean top. Bulging capacitors were frequent some years ago, especially from cheap motherboard manufacturer. Just google bulging capacitors to have better explanation

 

[Dave202]

Thanks, that's one thing I didn't check. None of them are bulging though, nor leaking (I've checked everything else in the Boot Problem thread - which leads me to believe it's the motherboard/CPU).

I'd just like to know if there is a worthwhile motherboard that will support everything I currently have, or am I stuck with buying the same motherboard? lol

 

[Dave202]

Bump.