I have an ASUS Socket 939 motherboard, AMD Athlon64 X2 dual-core processor, and two DIMMs of 1GB PC3200 RAM free for the taking. The catch is that one of them is bad. Based on past experience, I’d say the motherboard is toast and the processor and memory are just fine. That’s just a guess though.
I replaced the ensemble with a Core 2 Duo setup a few months ago when one of them went bad. Let me know via email if you want it.
What is it with motherboards breaking? Can we really not make them more durable? Processors and memory seem to run indefinitely in the absence of a power surge or a problem right out of the box, but it seems the MTBF of the average motherboard is only about 3 years. And it’s never that the audio or a USB port just stops working. It’s always some weird intermittent crash that at first looks like a different component is the problem.
Motherboards definitely seem to be prone to failure. Not sure why that is. Too many points of failure?
I guess. They do have a lot more soldered elements than most PC components. The failure rate still seems disproportionately high, though.
Agreed.