1:00 AM
Paul B
About 2 weeks ago the motherboard in my Acer Aspire M5100 desktop computer died. If you have been a long time follower of the blog, you know I am not a fan of Acer, mainly because of this computer. Also because of a problem I had with it a few years ago which caused me to have to use Acer's shotty tech support and customer service. Well thanks to hardware failure I am finally Acer free!
So the motherboard died, and I looked at getting a replacement board online for it. A refurbished motherboard for the Aspire M5100 goes for around $50. I decided that I was done with Acer though, and found a brand new ATX motherboard that would support the AMD Phenom 9500 for around $10 more at Tiger Direct. I decided to get that board. Since the Acer case however only supported Micro-ATX boards, that meant I had to get another case.
I went with the Cooler Master Elite 360 because it was a little less than $30 at Frys. The board I got was an ECS IC780M-A that can support up to 32GB of RAM! Awesome right?! Evertything else I cannibalized from the Aspire.
When I powered it on, it ran great except the power supply made some strange noises that drove my wife crazy. I decided that meant another trip to Frys, and I picked up a Cooler Master Extreme Power 500W PSU for $34.99 after mail in rebate. That was super quiet, and made my wife super happy! Everything was running like a champ!
Before buying this stuff though, I looked at just purchasing a new computer, and even a barebone kit to replace the broken Acer. I was looking between $500 to $1000. Just replacing a few of the parts only cost me around $130! The CPU, RAM and video card were still fairly decent, so why the hell not?
Got a similar story? Did you recently rebuild your home PC? What parts did you go with? Got a picture of it? Share it with us in the comments!
del.icio.us tags: home, pc, computer, build, cooler master, ecs, acer, save money
