Wich motherboards fit in the Acer Aspire M3985 desktop?

Rupert83

i'm looking to upgrade my Asprire M3985 (DT.SJQEH.010) with a i5-3470 cpu. I already have upgraded the HDD to SSD and upgraded GPU RAM over the years.

The only bottleneck in video-editing is now the CPU. I'd like to speed up the rendering process so i'm looking to upgrade that. (on a budget offcourse given the age of this machine). I don't need state of the art, a slightly newer gen i7 would suffice for my needs. If possible keeping my current ddr3 ram

I'm on the lookout for a second hand motherboard with i7 cpu. But what i'm i to look for ? Is there a motherboard out there to replace the currenct one or was the current motherboard specially designed for this tower? Any recommendations?

If not possible my option is to replace the cpu with a i7-3770(S/K)

thanks!

Rupert83

Thanks for the advice! My current motherboard supports 3770/s/k . So that would be the cheapest option. But is there a motherboard for a newer gen i7 that supports DDR3 that fits this model case ? 6th gen is DDR4 i see. So that leaves me with 4th or 5th gen i7. Are these significatly improvements over the i7-3770 or would you than advise me to look out for a 3770 since that is the cheapest and easiest solution?

billsey

Your motherboard likely supports the i7-3770 but not the K. The K has much different power requirements and needs a different BIOS to enable the extra features. The motherboard is a standard uATX (microATX) size so if you wanted a true upgrade you could replace it with any of a lot of different options. uATX or most anything smaller than that will work. Likely though you will find that just picking up a newer used system will be nearly the same cost as a used motherboard with CPU and memory, and a newer motherboard will also require a newer CPU and memory… You can reuse your SSD though, so there's a little savings there.