Replacement MB's
- Thread starter P5-133XL
- Start date
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Once the supply for a particular board dries up, finding replacements for it becomes frustrating in extreme. I usually wind up hitting Ebay and paying essentially new, retail price for a used replacement board. If I'm a little luckier, froogle.com will still have a listing or two for my board; there's still a couple stores out in the world where I can buy my long-discontinued GA-7S748s, but buying from some tiny shop that happens to have a Yahoo store isn't generally my idea of a good time.
Gigabyte at least issues RMAs in a somewhat timely fashion.
Gigabyte at least issues RMAs in a somewhat timely fashion.
mubs
0
Centrix International is well known for carrying repacement motherboards for OEM systems (Dell, IBM, Compaq, HP, Sun, Intel, etc.). They also carry other components for these systems. I've bought from them a few times (some years ago); they're good guys.
Mercutio said:
Yes, they issue RMA's quickly (2-4 days) and easily through the web. But unfortunately, when doing a repair of a customer's system I can't wait for the Gigabyte support system to send a repaired/replacement MB (6-8 weeks): I need to have a working replacement in the time frame of about 1 week or I start having rather unhappy dis-satisfied customers and to me that is an undesirable: I'm a pleaser ...
If I can't find a retailer, E-bay it will be and I don't trust used electronic components from Ebay because one never knows how thay have been handled and why they are being offered there in the first place. To me, they are high risk but better than nothing.
mubs said:
Already tried them and it was a no go. It isn't an OEM system but someones custom built machine. OEM systems have some advantages when getting replacement parts because there are places that seem to stock even very unusual parts.
Ideally I need a MB that is at least in the same family and basic capabilites so that in the worst case senerio I can force Windows to redetect the HW and everything is good to go. So a GA-7N400 series or a Ga-7nnxp Series is ideal. I have found numerous Nforce-2 MB's available but they tend to be of inferior product typically missing the giga-bit Ethernet that the original MB had. If necessary and with the permission of the owners, I suppose I could replace the MB with a yukky Nforce2 MB and an external Gigabit Ethernet card but that is less than ideal. Or I can ask the owner to wait the two months for GigaByte to send a replacement.