After 10 long years, my PC finally died

redrumloa

redrumloa

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I plugged in a usb to the back port and WHAM, it shut off. After troubleshooting it is clear the MB finally gave out. In recent years I've thought about building a new one, but in the end this one did everything I needed so it seemed a waste of money. Since I built it a decade ago I've only upgraded the RAM capacity once, and upgraded the GPU 3x times. It played every game I threw at it, and except for the rare video encoding/conversion, speed never seemed an issue.

I can reuse a number of parts off the old computer to build the new one, so what I really need to determine is just the MB/CPU and RAM. I want to build something that can potentially last me another 10 years. My old system had Nforce 790 Ultra SLI board, Intel Duo-Quad CPU at 2.66Ghz and DDR3 RAM. The CPU was certainly future proof when i paid up for it at the time. It benches roughly the same as a core i5 at the same speed.

What currently available would be the most future proof? I guess the recent exploits that hurt Intel the most makes things a bit more complicated. I'd prefer a full size ATX with SLI. A legacy floppy port would really be nice too. I'll pay up a bit here if it means future-proofing.

Any suggestions?
 
Since I posted this I spent a lot time pricing out options for new builds. The conclusion I came to was I'd have to drop quite a lot to build something significantly faster than what I currently have. It seems things have not progressed all that much in the last 10 years compared to how they had historically.In the end I decided to once again kick the can down the road. I've found an almost reasonable replacement Nforce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard on ebay and bought it. I'll get this going and look at maybe spending a significant amount in 2019 to build an i9 Monster.

In the end I bought a replacement MB and am also upgraded the CPU. Apparently Xeon for LGA771 will work in LGA775 sockets with a tiny modification. I bought a modded Intel Xeon X5470 3.33GHz (quad core) for $59 shipped. So in total I spent $160 to get this going again and up the CPU. That Xeon for multi-core benchmarks actually beats a Core i5 3570K.at nearly the same speed. It will be more than enough to power two GTX 1070 in SLI.

Hopefully the i9 prices drop next year, I will then drop a significant amount to build a monster that will last me another 10 years.
 
I had meant to throw a reply in here, but it rolled off the end of the list and I forgot about it before I had a chance to.

There are so many different approaches to building a modern PC. Mine seems to be almost the exact polar opposite of yours. Personally, I look for the highest performance CPU/Mainboard/RAM before the big price jump. I mean, it still buys you a great PC, probably 90% of the performance of the best on the market monster of the time, at like 25% of the cost. And I try to stick with a common config for the purpose.

A 3rd gen i5 is still a pretty reasonable office PC, but even the 3570k is not exactly a speed monster by any means.

To me, if my main machine toasted itself, and I were shopping, I'd go up to $650 or so, and get a i7-8700, nice 300 series motherboard, and 16GB RAM. That's nearly triple the performance of an i5-3570k, and most of what that octacore monster will do... All for a price that if something about it greatly annoys me or I have buyer's regret over, it's no big deal to junk it, sell the good parts on to someone for cheap, and rebuild differently after a couple years. I'm not stuck with a massive investment in some bleeding-edge thing that may be left high-and-dry after a year because of some fault no one knew, yet.
 
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