alexanrs wrote:For that price you might as well try to find a used SB i5 system.
Those still sell for a lot of money here - 200 euro at least. A good board + i5 2400 still go for well over 100 euro. If I want a mATX board (the machine's case is mATX form factor) it jumps even higher. Not to mention allmost no one has a Z77 or Z68 mATX board - and those who do will not sell them because there's no real reason to upgrade.
I do have a working i5 2500k CPU but no mATX board, and this machine NEEDS TO BE mATX. The only LGA1155 board I have is an Asrock z68 extreme3 gen3 witch will not fit in my Segotep TT cube chassis. I wanted to sell both at one point but I'm thinking I should hold on to them since I always sell stuff I don't use and cry about it later - like I sold my LGA1366 kit (GA-X58A-UD3R with USB3.0 + i7 920) a couple of years back, and now I have two LGA1366 CPUs and I can't find a working motherboard for them at a decent price.
I did find cheap boards that will take the 8230e - for 45-50 euro or so, but they are quite frankly crap. If I'm going to buy a new board, I want SATA 3, USB 3.0 and UEFI. No point in spending 50 euro for something identical to my biostar that just happens to support the FX series CPUs.
Here's a pertinent example - the ASRock 960GM-VGS3 FX supports the FX CPU line, but it has the exact chipset as my biostar, no uefi, no sata3 and no USB 3.0. Even the layout is 90% identical down to the arrangement of the cpu power circutry. The only real difference is sata port placement (worse on the Asrock), bios chip location and the fact that the asrock has a PCI-E 1x in place of a PCI slot in a location where it cannot be used due to the size of the video card. The Asrock costs about 48 euro, 51 shipped.
In contrast, I could go for the ASRock 970M Pro3 witch has UEFI, SATA 3 (6 ports), USB 3.0, two 16x PCI-E slots (one at 4x electrically), one PCI-E 1x slot and a PCI slot. It runs the newer AMD 970 chipset, has four memory slots instead of 2 and has VRM heatsinks. A MUCH better board for a total of 76 euro shipped.
So yes, I could sell both the X4 and the Biostar board for 40e (tried to sell them before, nobody would pay more) - I could also sell my i5 2500k + asrock z68 and I would have enough to buy a really nice motherboard for this machine and have money leftover, but I don't really want to. That's the point of this thread.
In any case, I opened a thread on bios-mods.com - maybe someone will be able to help me there.