A MOBO upgrade for my Acer M1640

Hello all,

The MCP73VE MOBO in my Acer M1640 has never failed. That is the value of
maintenance. Maybe it is obsolete. I should look for an ATX MOBO that allows
me to keep my goodies, Q6600 CPU, nVidia GTX 950, 240GB Kingston SSD, etc.
Maybe Win10 installed on the SSD would boot on the new MOBO?

USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 would help, going forward.

Suggestions and comments, please.

Thanks in advance.

Norm X wrote:
Hello all,

The MCP73VE MOBO in my Acer M1640 has never failed. That is the value of
maintenance. Maybe it is obsolete. I should look for an ATX MOBO that allows
me to keep my goodies, Q6600 CPU, nVidia GTX 950, 240GB Kingston SSD, etc.
Maybe Win10 installed on the SSD would boot on the new MOBO?

USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 would help, going forward.

Suggestions and comments, please.

Thanks in advance.

So you want USB3 and SATA3 ?

Do you have any PCI Express slots ?
Hmmm, doesn't look like there's a lot to work with here.
You'd need a "PCI Express Expansion Box" to split out
the x16 slot and share the graphics slot with multiple
I/O cards plus a graphics card. And for the $1000 that
would cost, you could buy a very nice new computer.

http://microdream.co.uk/acer-aspire-...l#.WC1L9p3wrQw

(Example of expansion box. Only x8 host card on this one.
I selected a small box, to keep the price down.)

http://magma.com/products/pcie-expan...pressbox-3400/

You have a PCI Express x1 slot. You could run a USB3
card in there, but due to how the lanes work, there's
no way to get the USB3 to run at full speed. I can
guarantee you it would run faster than USB2, but it
won't be good enough to beat others in benchmarks.

I have a board with X48 Northbridge on it, and what that
gives you is two slots to work with. They wouldn't generally put
X48 on a microATX. The RAM on X48 boards, could be
DDR2 or DDR3. This happens to be a DDR2 version of
X48 (the RAM type is set at motherboard design time).
The Southbridge is the usual boring USB2/SATAII.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GIGABYTE-GA-...#ht_5801wt_902

Then, you'd stick one of these in the second slot.
The X48 has two x16 slots, a total of 32 lanes.
A video card goes in one slot. And the "I/O card
of your dreams" goes into the second slot. Today,
someone might place a PCI Express Flash drive in
there, running at 2GB/sec. As an example of a
good peripheral for the second capable slot.

This was the first combo card with USB3 and SATA3
on the same card. You probably can't even find these
used any more.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessory/U3S6/

The U3S6 concept was good. It allows taking a wider slot
and breaking it down to drive more than one chip.
The materials exist today, to make a kickass board
like that. While at the time, they used the best
they could find. And the SATA3 chips back then,
some weren't the best (couldn't run full speed).
If Asus had to build the U3S6 today, they could
use their own Asmedia chips.

So the above suggestion is "bar bet material". Yes,
given an unlimited amount of money, I could
probably shoehorn USB3 and SATA3 into a box
with your Q6600, but really a new computer
would be better. Nothing beats native ports
on the Southbridge, mainly because the add-on
industry just wasn't serious about setting
the world on fire with their stuff.

*******

I see Syba did take a crack at reproducing the
Asus effort. So this would go with an X48 motherboard
or similar. You might be able to find LGA775 with
x16/x4 slot setup, or with X38/X48 you can get
x16/x16 slots.

https://www.amazon.com/Syba-SD-PEX50.../dp/B00CHYOQIE

But look what they chose for materials. Etron USB3 :-(
The Asmedia is probably OK. You still have to look
up the specs for an Asmedia to be sure you're getting
the right one. The oldest Marvell SATAIII might give
300MB/sec, while the Asmedia (with crippled x1 lane)
might manage 400MB/sec.

http://www.sybausa.com/index.php?rou...product_id=177

This one uses a NEC USB3 and an Asmedia 1061 for SATA3,
but it uses only an x1 PCI Express slot. You could
add this to your current system, and have a half-assed
SATA3 port. The USB3 using this, would definitely be
better than your USB2 ports. You might have a PCIE Rev 1.1
slot for the X1 on your current board, and then the
SATA3 would be limited by the slot, bigtime. If they'd
put a larger bridge chip and an x4 slot, it might have
been better.

http://logilink.org/media/datasheets/PC0059A.pdf

I'm surprised though, how many of these designs
I'm finding. Even if the materials used aren't
the best.

Um, get a new computer :-) Even a lower end CPU
will run a bit faster than the Q6600. You get to
keep that nice graphics card.

Paul

On 11/17/2016 12:48 AM, Norm X wrote:
Hello all,

The MCP73VE MOBO in my Acer M1640 has never failed. That is the value of
maintenance. Maybe it is obsolete. I should look for an ATX MOBO that allows
me to keep my goodies, Q6600 CPU, nVidia GTX 950, 240GB Kingston SSD, etc.
Maybe Win10 installed on the SSD would boot on the new MOBO?

USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 would help, going forward.

Suggestions and comments, please.

Thanks in advance.


I looked for a motherboard to use a Q6600 and associated bits and pieces
and finally decided that it wasn't worth the effort or expense. Just
nothing out there that suited my needs and what was still available was
overpriced and/or obsolete. By coincidence I did a cleanout of the junk
closet just yesterday and the defunct Q6600 MB went to the recycler
although I did pop out the memory and graphics card first.

As for the W10 you may or may not have success there. If it was an OEM
version or you upgraded from such then you probably will run into
roadblocks. I had upgraded my daily-driver i7 920 machine to W10 from W7
Ultimate and when I moved everything over to a newly-built i7 6700 machine
a few months ago I was able to do it and it booted flawlessly although I
had to go through MS's tech support folks to have them 'bless' the
transplant of the SSD and OS to the new box. It was painless and fairly quick.