Anyone ever tried to find the perfect Mother Board

[JohnBrowning]

Sure if you have deep pockets and do not mind just throwing money at the problem you could probably find the right board in 60 seconds or less. If on the other hand you want some very specific things and you want to get a good price you can spend a day doing it. Lucky for me the wife had today off as well so I was free to just troll around on the internet looking for Motherboards for my new AM2 AMD CPU that is on it's way. Lucky for me I do not need the latest greastes Chip set this opens a lot of doors for models that are a year or two old but are other wise brand new and loaded with features. I think what is really anoying me is that while SATA and Raid are great I have plenty of old school stuff that I want to reuse so I still want a floppy controller and and at least on UATA IDE controller. I want at least 3PCI slots what do I need with a bunch of pcicx1 or pcix4 slots? Why do I need 6 SATA ports how many hard drives and optical drives do I need? Why would anyone use the latest greatest chip set but then only give the board the most rudamentry conectors and output devicese etc... Some of these high dollar boards only have 4USB ports no optial or coxial outputs only one video output so you had better have what ever they have ont hat board on your monitor and silly stuff. So far I think the dubest things I have seen are mobo's that have a killer chip set and are designed for some of the most powerful CPU's on earth built on a board so small that you can not put all the stuff on it that you would really want to use with a processor that powerful.

I have no idea how they arive at priceing either since it seems to be all over the place. The mobo's with the most features are not always the most expensive. It apears like the chipset has more to do with the price then the features of the board.

Then their is the quality control and customer service issues. It seems like some of the most expensive boards come with poor quality control and poor customer service. You can not even use price as an indicator of quality. A company might have one board that has nothing but great reviews then another one in the same family has nothing but negative reviews due to lots of failures or DOA's!

I almost miss the days before the internet was so popular and customer did not get to leave reviews since they can be so biased. You really ahve no idea if it was the boards fault or if they person doing the work was an not up to the job and did something stupid. i have seen people that keep their collection of mobo's in one large box with one mobo stacked on top of another or just lieing on the floor for the cat and dog to walk on etc....... I think the customer reviews are makeing very hard for me to settle on a mobo since so many of them are negative.

I have narrowed it down to Asus,Biostar,MSI and Gigabyte. I am mostly leaning toward MSI and Asus based on a combination of reputation,price and feature content.

 

[Spartanfool]

I have built many a machine in my day, and the only advice I can give is based on the single MSI board I owned. It would run great most of the time, but would occasionally get flaky and force me to reset the BIOS.

I have not had any problems of note with the other three brands, but would lean toward an Asus.

Stay away from ECS. I've bought many based on price, but often end up spending too many hours getting them to run right.

 

[simple_gifts]

Quote:

It would run great most of the time, but would occasionally get flaky and force me to reset the BIOS


without overclocking? Not sure if this is an endorsement or not. I've had a few MSI boards, including a dual 866MHz Coppermine board which suddenly went poof after 3 years of 7x24 service; I don't have A/C so summertime seems to be tough on them.

 

[OVERKILL]

ASUS.

3 year warranty. And they are very good with their warranty. Though I've only ever had to use their mobo warranty ONCE since I started selling their product to my business clients. And this board was mine.

I have built hundreds of computer systems (probably actually closer to 1,000) and have experience with pretty much every major motherboard manufacturer under the sun.

And while ~90% of my sales are business systems (cost isn't much of an issue) I can say with absolute certainty that in my experience, ASUS has the lowest faliability rate of any board manufacturer I have every used.

Intel is pretty much on-par though. But obviously not any option for somebody shopping for a board for an AMD CPU

Chipset choice IS something to be aware of and here's why:

Many major chipsets have their "issues". How severe these issues are, and how they affect you may vary based on application.

For example, a number of the NVidia chipsets are affected by an IDE controller "bug" which causes corrupt data to be written to the drive.

BUT, while this bug has been observed in stock-clocked systems, it seems to be the most prominent in systems that are overclocked.

Intel's X38 and X48 chipsets are picky about memory compatibility.

And remember, vendors like ASUS have memory compatibility lists for their boards, be sure to consult this list before purchasing RAM if you are looking for guaranteed compatibility.

For your AMD CPU, I would stick with a chipset from NVidia or ATI/AMD. VIA, SiS or ALI are "bargain" chipsets and I would never sell a system based on one. In fact I don't even sell AMD, but that's neither here nor there

Hopefully this information is helpful to you.

-Chris

 

[eljefino]

FWIW I had two identical (except one had sound) ASUS boards die early deaths. Back in the Pentium Socket 7 days.

The worst mobos I've bumped into by far are OE ones. Stupid stuff like unlabeled front panel connectors really makes one tear their hair out.

I guess I'm not picky as I tend to go for the newegg mobo/CPU/fan bundle with free shipping or a rebate.

Having had a supposed quality Dell and a supposed cheezy emachines both develop bulgy capacitors in the same amount of time, I don't have much faith in any particular brand. The Dell made me swear off used computers though-- too much time plugged into the wall dries 'em out.

 

[OVERKILL]

The bulging capacitor issue had nothing to due with board use time, but more to do with cheap power supplies and bad capacitors. There was a company that basically every motherboard manufacturer was buying capacitors from that was producing sub-par caps and caused MASSIVE issues for a number of years.

I had an ABIT 440BX board, 6-PCI slots, slot 1. It was one of the best Slot-1 boards of it's era. Cannot remember the model number off the top of my head.

I had to replace ALL of the capacitors along the back of the CPU slot.

That board is still running strong in a system for a good friend of mine's mom.

My computers run 24/7. They will typically outlive their useful life before a component on a good board fails. A quick look at servers should be proof enough of that. You would be surprised how many NT4 servers are still in service!!