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Dead 1155 Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard--should I replace or upgrade?

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Nov 25, 2012
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Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UP5-TH
CPU
i5-3570K
Graphics
AMD RX570
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
I built a hack pro a year ago and suddenly my motherboard has died.

With Haswell chips now out and supported by Hackintosh I'm wondering if its worth replacing my current Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H board and selling on eBay my usable i5-3570K 3.4GHz processor and upgrading.

I'm undecided which new socket board to go for... The major down side I can see so far is a lack of Thunderbolt. Not sure I'd ever have used these though. And surely it's possible to get an extension card or convertor to USB?

Is the extra outlay worth the speed increase of Haswell? I reckon it'll cost an extra £40 (not taking into account the cost of a new motherboard--a replacement Gigabyte Z87-XXXX board is going to cost the same as a new Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H board of similar spec like the Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H or the UD5H or one of the OC boards).
 
I built a hack pro a year ago and suddenly my motherboard has died.

With Haswell chips now out and supported by Hackintosh I'm wondering if its worth replacing my current Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H board and selling on eBay my usable i5-3570K 3.4GHz processor and upgrading.

I'm undecided which new socket board to go for... The major down side I can see so far is a lack of Thunderbolt. Not sure I'd ever have used these though. And surely it's possible to get an extension card or convertor to USB?

Is the extra outlay worth the speed increase of Haswell? I reckon it'll cost an extra £40 (not taking into account the cost of a new motherboard--a replacement Gigabyte Z87-XXXX board is going to cost the same as a new Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H board of similar spec like the Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H or the UD5H or one of the OC boards).

Haswell is VERY slightly faster then Ivy clock for clock (and it is nothing to write home about). When OC is taken into consideration they are =. Haswell simply runs even hotter.

If you run integrated graphics only? The Haswell's new GPU is much improved. Personally? If not using integrated I would try to pick up a hackintosh compatible open box motherboard for 70 bucks at Microcenter or something. Thunderbolt is blah on hackintosh, and unless you are going for a high overclock those boards are fine. If you aren't OC at all or just going for a 4.2-4.4? I wouldn't bother with anything more then the cheapest z77 board that will work. Even the cheapest gigabyte z77 will do like 4.4 most times.

The only reason I might consider haswell is if you plan to go to i7 later as i7 ivy's will be a pain to find.
 
Thanks for the advice deathjester.

I have a seperate 660txi card so integrated graphics aren't really important to me and currently i've not OC'd my i5 CPU. If I was to upgrade to a Haswell I wasn't planning on jumping to an i7 either.

Guess its worth just sticking to the Z77 boards. Are there still issues with some of the lower range models like the D3H having audio ports that don't work or USB/wake issues? When I researched some of the cheaper boards before building my hackintosh earlier in the year, I seem to remember this being an issue?
 
My GA-Z77X-UD5H just died as well. I bought my board as a refurbish from Microcenter four months ago. It's disappointing that it died so quickly, but some searching online suggests that it's not as uncommon as it should be. So today I bought a refurbished D3H, which gets much better reviews on Amazon than the UD5H, as a replacement while I try to get Gigabyte to fix the UD5H under warranty. Gigabyte has a three-year warranty, so it's probably worth a shot if you can live with the hassle of RMA and Gigabyte support.

I weighed the decision of moving up to 8-series chipset and 4th gen chips, but I just bought my 3770K with the mobo a few months ago and hate to swap it all out again. My pre-dead-mobo rig was working great! I'd be happy for a year or two with that ... I want that back. On the bright side, after swapping in the D3H, my Hac booted right up. I just ran MB6.1 to get ethernet and audio working, rebooted, and I'm good to go. I was pleasantly surprised!

Anyway, just griping about my dead UD5H. I agree with deathjester's comments and will be sticking to 7-series for a while.
 
My GA-Z77X-UD5H just died as well. I bought my board as a refurbish from Microcenter four months ago. It's disappointing that it died so quickly, but some searching online suggests that it's not as uncommon as it should be. So today I bought a refurbished D3H, which gets much better reviews on Amazon than the UD5H, as a replacement while I try to get Gigabyte to fix the UD5H under warranty. Gigabyte has a three-year warranty, so it's probably worth a shot if you can live with the hassle of RMA and Gigabyte support.

I weighed the decision of moving up to 8-series chipset and 4th gen chips, but I just bought my 3770K with the mobo a few months ago and hate to swap it all out again. My pre-dead-mobo rig was working great! I'd be happy for a year or two with that ... I want that back. On the bright side, after swapping in the D3H, my Hac booted right up. I just ran MB6.1 to get ethernet and audio working, rebooted, and I'm good to go. I was pleasantly surprised!

Anyway, just griping about my dead UD5H. I agree with deathjester's comments and will be sticking to 7-series for a while.

I, like you, discovered the board was just dead. Some how the BIOS had been fried or become corrupt. I ended up sending it back to the original supplier who in turn sent it on to Gigabyte. They claimed that a whole bunch of the CPU pins were bent and this is what was causing the problem. Seemed a little odd to be but they ended up fixing all the problems for free and I just had to pay the delivery charges.

I also used a DS3H as a temporary board whilst my UD5h-TH got repaired. Seemed pretty solid to me. And the sound worked. Unlike my now replace UD5H board which doesn't seem to have sound at all, not even in Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Makes me thing that now may be fried?
 
I don't have the -TH model, just the UD5H. I'm concerned that when I get mine back from Gigabyte it will die again. Those boards seem to be hit or miss. Against my better judgement, I'll probably put it in and sell the D3H and hope this doesn't happen again. (Hope is not a strategy!) I also had problems with my sound with the UD5H, but I think it was more about getting OS X configured right than my hardware. This D3H board just ... works. Kind of nice. I am missing the extra USB 3.0 socket on the UD5H though. It's silly, but I was using both of them before and now I only have one. So it's either the case's USB or my card reader - can't hook both up with the D3H.
 
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