New Mobo for slightly older Processor?

[Ah forget it]

Hi Folks,

Looks like my MOBO has gone up in smoke and am keen to replace it as soon as possible but not replace my existing components if I can help it! I'm unsure what decent mid range mobo to go for that would support the following components, would seriously appreciate any suggestions folks might have, I'm guessing the sticking point might be the processor which is nearly 4 years old now.

800W Power supply
INTEL i7 CORE 2 QUAD 920 (2.66GHZ, 8MB L2 CACHE, 1066MHZ FSB) Socket 1366
3 x CORSAIR 2GB PC12800 DDR3 1600MHZ RAM
OZC 120GB SSD SATA 3 HD
WESTERN DIGITAL 750GB S-ATA 7200RPM HARD DRIVE
2GB XFX HD7870 Core Edition DD

Any guidance massively appreciated!

[AEGIS]

You don't have a budget, what model board were you "smoking".
Check these out:
- Gigabyte GA X58A OC (rev 1.0)
- Gigabyte G1 Guerrilla (rev 1.0)
- Gigabyte G1 Sniper (rev 1.0)
- Gigabyte Assasin (rev 1.0)
- ASUS P6X5E PRO
- ASUS Sabertooth X58
- ASUS Rampage III Extreme
LGA 1366 Intel X58
- ASUS Rampage III Formula

A lot of these x58 mobo is scarce, just need to keep looking around. Good Luck

[ET3D]

If you want to stick to this CPU, you should probably pick a motherboard on eBay or such. Most stores won't carry these motherboards, and if they do the price will be very high.

Alternately take this as an opportunity to upgrade the CPU. A modern Core i5 (Ivy Bridget or Haswell) will be a big upgrade to your 920 (see Anandtech's Bench - in this case a comparison to an AMD FX-6300, which has about the same performance as the i7 920).

[jonathan_phang]

Had a quick look at some older posts of the OP and it looks like the board they had before was a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R. This isnt that expensive a board, but you will have to go through the usual second hand suspects of eBay and Gumtree, but the price is low-ish enough to warrant the risk of these places. In terms of of upgrading to a newer platform, I asked this question myself in another thread here, and it really does depend on what you are running that i7 920 at.

I've got my 930 at 4.2 and as per that thread, theres not much it cant handle (at decent visual quality), albeit that was with crossfire 5850s before - so if you are in the region of 4ghz then I would sit tight really, otherwise its a whole lot more to upgrage, with RAM, cooler, CPU and mobo to replace.

If you arent overclocking, then there are plenty of X58 LGA 1366 boards on eBay, so you shouldnt have trouble finding one - just make sure you ask about the CPU socket and bent pins, otherwise you are asking for trouble with memory. I've just managed to get a Rampage III extreme, to replace my Rampage II extreme, so even the high end board are available.

Are there any particular things you'd like on the board?