Motherboard Brand experiences

[God_Devil_Morta]

I was reading in this forum that Abit boards are not up to par with their predecessors of the BX era. I'm using a BH6 right now and I'm happy with it so I was going to buy a IT7- Max board from Abit, but now after hearing that Abit boards aren't that reliable anymore I'm not sure which brand of motherboard I want to buy. Can people please tell me their exprience with motherboard manufactures, good and bad. Thanx

[xortam]

You should list some of your requirements. For example:
overclockability
upgradeability
AMD or Intel CPU, which CPU specifically
FSB speeds
memory type(s)
budget or quality (priority)
on-board options (sound, LAN, SCSI, etc.)
looks
... etc.

[God_Devil_Morta]

Ok, for me, I'm getting a 1.6A P4
looking to overclock that to...well we'll just see : )
FSB up to 166
Ram: CORSAIR PC2700 CAS2 256MB
DDR CMX256A-2700C2 SINGLE-SIDED
Quality board, no budget boards
On board lan is good
Was thinking about on-board IDE Raid
But now not so sure...
Most of all my motherboard has to be stable
while overclocked AND last me at least
two years

[Wombat]

My favorite quality board makers: Epox and MSI. Well made boards that last a long time. A lot of people have good things to say about Asus too, but I've heard a couple problems recently as well. ECS had something impressive with their SiS 735 boards, but one good product does not a legacy make, so it's too soon to tell.

Between EpoX and MSI:
MSI is more likely to have on-board whatever, EpoX is more likely to give you that little bit extra of tweaking. You'll have to compare their latest offerings to be sure.

Whatever brand you choose, avoid Highpoint controllers at all cost.

[Indiana]

Asus: not so great experience (from the K7M, had some AGP problems)

ABIT: never gave me one single problem, but was an IntelBX based board. Oh, yes it had a very well working Highpoint RAID controller on it.

MSI: one AMD board, DOA. replaced it with a

EPoX: two AMD boards, very good first the 8KHA, now 8K3A). everything a oc'er could wish, best stability, good price, the necessary things onboard.

And again to give another view to the highpoint-RAID: I have/had a HPT370 based PCI RAID card on both those EPoX boards that is working extremely well under Win2k (and I DO stress the RAID, doing many full-res vidcaptures, the Highpoint is fully up to the task. Unfortunately IBMs harddrives weren't..)

[SteveC]

My Epox 8K7a+ just packed in and took a 1gig, then a 1800+ athlon CPU with it I loved that board too.

I'm not keen on Abit any more as they seem to release a new board each week, and each one is the best one ever. If that's the case, what's wrong with last weeks one?

[God_Devil_Morta]

Anyone actually had problems with Abit boards based on intel chipsets, cause most of the boards that I read about that went bad was based on Vias

[God_Devil_Morta]

Oh and can you guys post about your hard drive experiences also, much appreciated.

[dZeus]

Motherboards:
Abit: high RMA rates because of leaking caps and also highpoint IDE (avoid HighPoint at all times).
Asus: great quality, but the price is probably too high in comparison. Also their BIOSes behave a little erratic (they ignore certain settings you set under certain conditions)
MSI: reasonable, some boards have silly compatibility issues
ECS: work ok as long as all your hardware has no compatiblity problems with them. They have a great performance/value ratio if you do

Harddrives:
I don't think return rates differ much at all between the different brands and models, except for IBM 60 and 75 GXP series (too early to comment on the 120 GXP series yet). Further main differences:
WD: great performane in their 7200rpm series (dunno about their 2 5400 rpm series of drives).
Seagate: the Barracuda ATA IV (7200rpm) is one (if not _the_) quietest IDE drive model on the market. Performance is slightly less.
Maxtor: great value for performance (for the 7200rpm model).
IBM: high return rates on 60 and 75 GXP series!!! (much, MUCH higher than competitors' drives)

btw. these experiences are based on working part time in a shop which sells PC components for about a year now.

[MetalCartman]

If you buy that P4 1.6A, you can easily get it to 2133MHz (FSB133), mine runs at 2400MHz (FSB150, 1,775V) on a Asus P4B266-E. This board is an overclockers dream, absolutely stable and many options to play around with in the BIOS. If the FSB is set higher than 133MHz, the PCI/AGP is locked to 33/66MHz automatically, you can even tweak that to 36/72MHz.

[Indiana]

And if you get the P4 to 2GHz it'll still be slower than an stock AthlonXP1800+ in average use. Sorry, but I have both and can actually compare those. In synthetic benchmarks like Sandra the P4 is looking good, also in the bad-quality DVDx setting Tom's hardware apparently uses.

But if you compare general Windows2k/XP performance and DVDx'ing at HQ settings the AthlonXP is just soo much snappier...

[Dr Mordrid]

I had both the Abit BH6 and BE6 blow up on me. They blew so many caps so fast it sounded like popcorn cooking. Both were Intel 440BX based boards.

I refuse to buy one of their POS's now.

Dr. Mordrid

[ALBPM]

ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!! Sounds better than Orville Redenbachers

Paul

[Marshmallowman]

yeah I have had similar expirences

abit bh6, still chuggingalong in the corner (damn reliable)
But a large number of retailers stopped stocking abit boards due to the returns they were getting on the KT7's.
I do have KR7 in my house which is runnig very well, it is doing some major number crunching with 2 G of memory(all 4 dimm slots filled!!) and it has not missed a beat or crashed(once we got rid of windows XP)

msi good stuff ,reliable. but the drivers/bios..etc don't get updated to often and they will often ignore incompatibliies for quite a while(but eventually they often get the message)

epox excellent price and quality (but I do *hear* the of the occasional one dieing well after waranty has ran out)
My current board is 8kta3+ and the higpoint RAID is reliable and fast (it did take 5 months of different bios's and drivers to get it there)

ECS 735..cheap boards are not supposed to be this reliable and fast...whole heartedly impressed. But it has no overclocking features, so you have to be handy with a pencil

[Dr Mordrid]

I have lots of pencils

Unfortunately product managers tend to frown on testing with overclocked system....

Dr. Mordrid