I've finally decided to replace the motherboard of my desktop rig (z77x-ud3h), as it has suffered from random freezes pretty much from the day that I've had it. I won't describe them in detail, main thing is that I didn't find out about the problem until after buying the board, and any and all solutions that have been listed on the various threads about it (they exist for most Gigabyte z77-chipset motherboards, same symptoms) haven't worked permanently - the best that I got at one point was 2 months without a freeze... followed by another one 4 days later. Have also swapped videocards / removed the x-fi prelude / change the PSU (used to be an 850w FSP unit) / played with ram slots and sticks (+ relaxed timings, higher voltage, etc), nevermind that I didn't have any such issues on my previous build with mostly the same components (well, q9400 instead of 3770k due to sockets).
So bottom line is, I want to ditch it for something else that is comparable (z77, stable clocker... preferably having 1 PCI slot for the x-fi prelude), but I'm afraid that the same situation might happen again - seeing a board that is highly recommended, but with issues which you can hardly find mentioned anywhere unless you look specifically for them. I'd appreciate suggestions of both models and perhaps ways to spot such things next time (even though I guess it's research research research... which I thought I'd done but you have to draw a line somewhere I guess
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So bottom line is, I want to ditch it for something else that is comparable (z77, stable clocker... preferably having 1 PCI slot for the x-fi prelude), but I'm afraid that the same situation might happen again - seeing a board that is highly recommended, but with issues which you can hardly find mentioned anywhere unless you look specifically for them. I'd appreciate suggestions of both models and perhaps ways to spot such things next time (even though I guess it's research research research... which I thought I'd done but you have to draw a line somewhere I guess