Motherboard upgrades

z3r010 said:

I've just looked, he was awaiting email confirmation of his account, but I've manually done it now.

Thanks.

- - - Updated - - -

selden said:

You might need to check the motherboards' manuals.

Both CPU and motherboard have to support integral graphics if you want to be able to use it. The motherboard has to provide the graphics generated by the CPU's integrated GPU on one or more video connectors on the motherboard's I/O panel. There usually are several different types of video connectors on the I/O panel: HDMI and DisplayPort are the most common. Usually those video outputs are all simultaneously active. Most modern IGPUs are capable of driving as many as three displays, each with a different image. The documentation for a motherboard should include a description of the video connectors, certainly in its installation manual.

However, some high-end motherboards intended for overclocking and gaming do not support integral graphics and do not have video connectors on their I/O panels. Their designers assume that the buyer of that type of board will be using a high-end graphics card. Integral GPUs simply do not have the performance necessary to deliver high framerates with AAA games on high resolution (e.g. widescreen 4K) displays.

Hopefully you're aware that you have to be very careful when specing a modern, pre-built business computer. Most have proprietary motherboards and power supplies, with little or no expansion capability: M.2 storage soldered to the motherboard, only two memory slots and no SATA connections.

You make a good point. I have one brand name tower (Acer) and the laptops, obviously, aren't very expandable at all. The Acer is fairly current technology with Windows 11 a 6 core i5 and an NVME SSD. It is the fastest computer we have but, as you say, limited in expandability. It is more than enough for our purposes. It serves our customer service function. The tower I use is an old home built one with a Gigabyte motherboard that I have upgraded to a SATA SSD. I only use it for accounting, order processing, web site maintenance and basic network server functions. Upgrading it for Windows 11 wouldn't be very expensive since I would only need board and processor and maybe some DDR4 memory. The other towers need an overhaul.

Our three laptops already have windows 11 and one of them, the one I'm using at the moment is current technology and has an i5 processor and SSD. The ones with hard drives are glued together so there isn't any way that I want to deal with upgrading them. We'll use them until they die (or more likely until the charger connectors wear out.}

selden said:

I suggest including DDR4 memory in your plans.

My understanding is that most Intel CPUs which are new enough to be compatible with Win11 (9th through 11th gen) would need DDR4 memory. 8th gen can use either DDR3 or DDR4, depending on the motherboard. Similarly, 12th gen can use either DDR4 or DDR5, again depending on the motherboard.

I've seen some rumors that planned updates to Win11 are likely to make it incompatible with some of the older CPU models that currently are acceptable. I dunno how true that is, but it is a possibility to take into account.

I ordered some affordable products that I think will upgrade one of the computers more than adequately for business use. ASUS B560 Plus motherboard, Intel i5 10400 processor, 16gb DDR4 ram and a 1tb M2 SSD from Samsung. The total is around $400 which seems like a bargain. It will all go into a larger than necessary ATX case that I am upgrading that has a strong power supply and blu-ray drive. I will clone the SSD from the hard drive and wait for it to update to windows 11. If that works out, II'll do it to the others. The others have SATA SSD's so I can subtract the M2 SSD from the configuration.

My advice to Microsoft would be to be more sensitive to the needs of people with older hardware that works perfectly. I wouldn't need any of this if they hadn't been so fussy about hardware. I suppose they want to sell more of their laptops. Windows may have been launched 11 just to obsolete hardware since it doesn't really offer anything important that 10 still does just fine. Who knows?