Newer/faster board/CPU that I can swap my existing hardware to?

Robert P

Member
I have a machine running a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P that runs a Core2 Quad, DDR2 RAM and it's just not up to running newer games - "newer" to me is Battlefield 1. This Gigabyte board has PCIe 2.0 slots so clearly I'm not getting the most out of a PCIe 4 card.

I was running an NVidia GTX770 (PCIe 3) that developed problems and just grabbed a Radeon RTX 6600 because that's what they had. It's a PCIe 4 card, it just seems silly to be running a PCIe 4 GPU on a PCIe 2 board.

I see that newer machines run an SSD that's a plug-in chip rather than the playing card sized SSDs with SATA connections that I have.

Ideally I'd like to go to a newer board that will go into the same case and accommodate:

- SATA SSD drives like what I have including for the system drive
- PCIe 4 GPU - if there's no such thing as a PCIe 4 board that uses SATA SSDs then PCIe 3 will do.
- Floppy drive
- Optical drive

Doesn't have to run the newest CPU, just something that will comfortably run Battlefield 1 at say 60fps or faster. I have a bias toward Intel chips.

Asked another way - what's the newest board that uses SATA SSD drives?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
 
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johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
You'll need motherboard, cpu and ram. So what are we looking at for a budget? Motherboards won't have the port for floppy drives anymore. You'll need to either buy an addin card with the port or just buy an external usb floppy drive such as this.


If you are looking for a NVME SSD then this is basically what you are looking at.


Just over 400 bucks USD.
 

Robert P

Member
You'll need motherboard, cpu and ram. So what are we looking at for a budget? Motherboards won't have the port for floppy drives anymore. You'll need to either buy an addin card with the port or just buy an external usb floppy drive such as this.


If you are looking for a NVME SSD then this is basically what you are looking at.


Just over 400 bucks USD.
Thanks - can you state the name/model of the board - your pcpartpicker link sends me into an endless cycle of Captcha challenges.
 
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johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Here is a screenshot.

Not sure why you would be getting captcha challenges.
 

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Robert P

Member
Here is a screenshot.

Not sure why you would be getting captcha challenges.
Maybe something to do with my VPN and running Brave browser.

Thanks - I finally did get to that link. However I see it uses the NVME type of SSD, what I'm looking for is something that uses this kind of SSD with SATA connections. If there's no such thing as a board that has PCIe 4 that uses that kind of SSD then whatever will. The whole point is to be able to swap over as much of my existing hardware as possible.

1659132907722.png
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
All new motherboards will have the SATA connectors. But to be honest if you are going new, then spring for NVME boot drive. You won't regret it. So much faster than a sata SSD.
 

Robert P

Member
All new motherboards will have the SATA connectors. But to be honest if you are going new, then spring for NVME boot drive. You won't regret it. So much faster than a sata SSD.
Doesn't have to be new, newer than what I have that will accept the SATA SSD and run a faster generation CPU than the Core2 Quad is fine. The NVME may be faster but it's not necessarily crucial - I want to run the SATA SSD and don't want a drive that I'm not necessarily going to use.

Robert P said:
it just seems silly to be running a PCIe 4 GPU on a PCIe 2 board.
It just seems silly to be running a SATA SSD on a PCIe 4 NVME board.
Ergo why my criteria as stated originally is something newer than what I have that runs SATA drives as the default and accommodates a faster CPU. As stated originally stated my goal is to end up with something reasonably faster than what I have now without having to replace a bunch of perfectly good hardware. It doesn't have to be the fastest available.
 
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beers

Moderator
Staff member
something newer than what I have that runs SATA drives
Don't worry, every board you'd be looking at contains SATA ports.

AM5 is also just around the corner if you can hang on another month or so which might be a better longevity play being a new socket/platform with pcie5/ddr5/usb4
 
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