3d ago

Time for a new Motherboard, need advice

The USB onboard controller on my ASUS Crosshair VI seems to have busted on me. That being said, it would seem I’m now in the market for a new MB.

I haven’t been keeping up with the industry and my MB crash is a bit unexpected, so I’m coming into this a bit blind. Looking for advice or feedback from your own experiences.

I have the following components:

2 x 16 gb 288 pin 3600 DDR4 SDRAM G.Skill Trident Z Neo
EVGA FTW3 RTX 3080Ti
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core/16thread
Seasonic - PRIME TX-1000 80+ Titanium PSU

Looking for suggestions. Not sure if it’d be better to get a new CPU and MB or continue with the current setup with a new MB. I’m also vibing with MBs that have very little to no RGB, I’m a bit RBG’d out.

Appreciate any help or advice

(Edit: added PSU)

8 comments

You could just get a PCI-e USB card. They come in USB-A and USB-C varieties or mixes of the two and some have internal pin headers to replace the motherboard ones.
- I thought of this, but I’m frozen on the bios splash screen with or without USB peripherals plugged in.
  I get error 98 in boot with any USB device plugged in, which I think means USB init starts, but hangs during enumeration.
  If i remove all usb devices it hangs on at D7, which i think means that USB init completes, no input found.
  The fact that it’s not moving past BIOS splash screen is concerning and leads me to think this won’t be a viable solution. I’d imagine that the board will still try onboard USB first and hang before they ever reach the PCIe card. I did some other troubleshooting, at this point I’ve accepted that the board is toast.
  
  Ah yeah that does sound pretty borked.
  
  Does it get far enough to start a flash update?
  Or even, have you tried to reset the bios?
  I've had similar experiences in the distant past where a fresh bios helped.
X570 or B550 would probably be your best bet if you wanted to stay with AM4, and X570S (no chipset fan like the original version) would be ideal if you can find a board. I really liked the Crosshair VIII Dark Hero I ran for a while, but it's not particularly cheap.
As for minimizing RGB, MSI usually includes a physical switch on the board for turning it off-- in addition to the software switch in the BIOS-- if that seems appealing. ASRock also lets you manage very basic RGB settings directly in the BIOS if you just want to avoid installing extra software.
If you move up to AM5 you'll need a new board, CPU, and RAM... so that route could be pretty expensive. That's the route most would probably recommend, though, instead of investing more in an older platform.
Current Intel isn't really worth it for gaming, and 13th/14th gen honestly aren't worth the worry/headache.
I'd get an MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK of some sort and chuck all your current stuff in there and call it a day. It's been the budget industry champ for Ryzen 3000 and 5000 chips for 5 years now.
It has lots of power with a rock solid Mosfet and there are only a couple of RGB lights that can be set to white and static which matches the decor pretty well. It's currently 130USD on Bezos 'R' US.

8 comments