Motherboard Substitute?

July 25, 2007 11:49 PM

What's a comparable replacement for this motherboard?

I'm faced with replacing the motherboard on a Fry built PC (FM-7540). The board is a 865G-M Motherboard Socket 478 and these seem to be very hard to find, alas only 2 on ebay and nothing found anywhere else. Is there another board both suitable and in better supply that I can substitute?

posted by swiffa to computers & internet (6 comments total)

What are the parts you're trying to keep in use? What's your purpose for this machine? What's your budget to replace the motherboard? With new machines going for rock-bottom prices, replacing a rare old part pay not pay off.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 12:19 AM on July 26, 2007

That said, you can probably use any board that's compatible with your parts, though it's a little bit of a crapshoot. I've always been successful though. What I'd look for:

1) compatible with your CPU (if it's more recent than the CPU, it's almost certainly compatible, but you can check the manual at the manufacturer's website).

2) compatible with your RAM (same type, basically-- if it's DDR, make sure it uses DDR and not DDR2, or whatever).

3) has whatever PCI/AGP/whatever slots you need, onboard video/sound/ethernet, and so on.

If you're running Windows, you'll have to do a 'repair install' which was basically painless for me when I swapped motherboards, though a backup would not be a bad idea in any case. All my settings and programs were perfectly preserved.

You should answer the questions above, though.
posted by alexei at 1:08 AM on July 26, 2007

ECS 865G-M INTEL 865G CHIPSET SERIAL ATA150 MICRO ATX FORM FACTOR 1xAGP(8X)/3xPCI/4xDDR W/INTEGRATED VGA,SATA,LAN,1394,USB 2.0 & AUDIO (CPU TYPE:INTEL PENTIUM 4 - 800MHZ)

This newegg board looks like a drop in replacement, but it only has 4 memory slots, so if you bought extra memory you are out of luck.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:28 AM on July 26, 2007

Based on the specs of your machine, I found these two motherboards at the Newegg website that seem like they should work (1 2). The only real difference that could be a compatibility issue is the speed of your memory - board #1 is DDR333 while board #2 is DDR400.

The caveat with all these Socket 478 boards at Newegg is they're all micro-ATX and I'm not sure if that will work in your machine.
posted by junesix at 1:34 AM on July 26, 2007

Sorry, I meant to say 3 memory slots.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:39 AM on July 26, 2007

The ECS board he is replacing is both Micro ATX, and DDR 400.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:40 AM on July 26, 2007