My five year old PC has gone kaput! Letting out the magic smoke, my nose told me has I took it apart. I have found the offending part on the power phase to the CPU.
Getting hold of an Z79 board is going to be tricky. eBay is full of speculative auctions trying to sell old hardware at silly prices. Or second hand going for close to original cost.
I'm in the UK and need a Z79 main board, dose anyone have any suggestions. Lets not forget that this once might CPU is out paced by a 6 core Ryzen so I'm not going to be spending too much on it.
Looks like power stage based VRM. You could try and removing the blown fet and see if your voltage controller can deal with the missing phase. I have seen GPUs and CPUs work with a missing fet without any problems, just got to remove the broken phase so it doesn't short out the circuit.
I have seen it work before, either it just skips the phase or you simply get a little dip in the voltage which isn't usually a problem with that many phases. A board with power stages tends to have a high quality voltage controller that can compensate.
As for this conversation. Both @Castellorizon and @MisteryAngel have points.. One MSI is shit.. and two you are kind of playing russian roulette by powering a board and letting a high quality Vcon do the heavy lifting. its honestly better and safer to get a new board because one these voltage dips can flip bits and corrupt data and sometimes that data is sentimental data and 2 because well arent new toys always nice. I say dont play the roulette because only some boards can skip a phase and they are often boards that are doubled because the doubler can compensate for the loss however its something like a tre 4+1 oor true 8+2 the board will just fail
The price on that second hand ASUS board got silly.
Plane B... Sell the RAM and 3930K and build a new system.
I will have to wait a month or so because I have some money turning up.
Looks like I'll be returning to AMD and build a Ryzen rig. Use some of my old components to keep costs down. My nVidia 980Ti should give me enough gaming performance for a couple more years.
As for the MSI board I might mount it on the wall like I did with my XFX 7970 when it died.
