Motherboard Replacement Needed ASAP, can anyone help?

[djspacee]

Hi guys,

as the title says, my motherboard has broken and i need to replace it with something fairly urgently. Have had numerous different problems with the current one which is a GA-P35-DS3P.

 

First this started out as something weird hapening with the hard disk (samsung spinpoint 500 gb). The drive would start clicking every two seconds or so and the computer would have trouble transferring data from the drive, and also freeze up randomly every so often.

 

have done drive diagnostics and allsorts, reformatted many times, and then eventually sent it bk to samsung who gave me a brand knew drive. Formatted, reinstalled, and two days later, the same thing happened again.

 

Now my windows hard drive has failed to be seen in bios, which is compltely random as it has been working perfectly since i bought it in january (samsung spinpoint 160 gb).

 

I had been experiencing rendom graphics problems every so often in leopard, where the screen would go blue (like what it does when its starting up) for a few seconds and then go back to the desktop. Thought this might be something to do with the software or bios configuration i was using at the time. Last night this happened every 2 mins for about 20 seconds at a time. and i've concluded that this is obviously a hardware problem and is pretty obviously related to the mothjerboard as have been experiencing problems with the hard disks s well.

 

My 500 gig backup drive has been funny as well, had to reformat it and luckily ddnt lose any data

 

My Maxtor 80 gigabyte drive is an old one i use as an emergency OSx installation encase the main one fails for any reason, and now this is loading very slowly and sometimes only gets to the black screen before the os x desktop.

 

I decided that this must be the motherboard malfunctioning, as so many unrelated problems are happening.

 

So, i'm going to replace my GA-P35 -DS3P with something else and need suggestons on what to buy and what is currently good and relaible at the moment, but has at least a P35 chipset for future upgrades.

 

i would , if possible like to avoid Jmicron IDE controllers as these really are terrible and have given me a lot of problems ( as well as about 20 waster blank CDs)

 

I hope you guys can help and would appreciate it very much if you do

 

Thanks

 

p.s the reason i need a motherboard so urgently is because im in the last two months of a degree level course and need to do my work on it. the replacement from microdirect.co.uk could take up to two months and this is just unnacceptable. plus ive had to replace the ds3p before already and would like to try something else, possible asus, asrock or msi

 

and sorry, i forgot to add that i have a 2.4ghz core 2 duo processor and so the motherboard must be socket 775

 

Oh, and also, i have already tried searching for three hours today to try and find a decent motherboard, but i don't know the pros and cons of the knew motherbaord chipsets that have been released since august last year, and also a lot of the asus boards seem to have Jmicron controllers which is very annoying!

[knewsom]

my board has been pretty stable for me... and it's an X38 chipset for about $200, a bit less than most other X38 boards. Pretty much everything works, I'm running a Vanilla Kernel, and have yet to have a kernel panic. Just one or two hangups/freezes that seem likely to me to be hardware related. I've experimented pushing the memory usage to the max, and the CPU too.

 

...have you tried contacting Gigabyte regarding your malfunctioning board? Perhaps they'd warranty-replace it?

[djspacee]

my board has been pretty stable for me... and it's an X38 chipset for about $200, a bit less than most other X38 boards. Pretty much everything works, I'm running a Vanilla Kernel, and have yet to have a kernel panic. Just one or two hangups/freezes that seem likely to me to be hardware related. I've experimented pushing the memory usage to the max, and the CPU too.

 

...have you tried contacting Gigabyte regarding your malfunctioning board? Perhaps they'd warranty-replace it?

 

Yeah I thought that Gigabyte were a good manufacturer, and made fairly good quality boards. I don't know whats happened to it, maybe it's had a small fault which has got worse over the time I've had it. Maybe because they are more cheaply made than other brands, they actually develop faults more quickly, I don't know.

 

um, no actually i havent tried contacting gigabyte. The store told me that I would have to do everything through them, and I think the warranty is only with them as well. which means it could possibly be anything up to two months before I get a new one sent. I was planning to buy another so that I could have the system up and running again in a few days.

 

cheers for trying to help

 

Has anyone had experiences with boards other than gigabyte, which are at least P35 or knewer, which they would recommend?

[vaporATX]

I just got a EP35-DS3R that I bought to build a gaming rig. I've been absolutely torturing this thing with a high overclock of a E6550 (not an easy to overclock proc). It has been thru numerous 12-18 hour full load runs working up to 3.5GHz. The board has been rock solid stable. Gigabyte makes very high quality boards at reasonable prices. The only reason I don't use them as much as Asus or DFI is the bios options usually aren't as extensive. Why don't you just RMA it for a replacement? But that doesn't answer your question... sorry. I'd suggest this: If you really know what you are doing get a DFI board. If you want something easy like the Gigabyte board get an Asus or Abit board. As far as the jmicron controller... yeah, lots of boards have it, just disable it. You shouldn't be using IDE anything these days anyway. Soons boards will stop coming with IDE altogether.