Motherboard Brand experiences

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
I have lots of pencils

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

Dr. Mordrid

"We have just finished our 6 month study and concluded the real reason why our products don't seem to be stable on AMD based system; Vehement and abusing overclocking of AMD CPU's in those systems"
Developer manager........

______________________

Lets face it :
Most motherboard makers scream out how good their boards are when you overclock!

Most gfx card manufactures make it much to easy to overclock the life out of your newly bought card....

I come across to many computers that are overclocked to the brink and the owner doesn’t think that the overclocking have anything to do with the fact that their computers only run 30 min at a time....

(Corrected spelling and grammar, might even be understandable )

[The PIT]

Abit BF6 worked like a charm clocked a 800mhz PIII to a gig without any crashes just when Intel recalled the 1 gig.

Abit KT133a Raid through it in the bin soon after I upgraded to an Epox 8kha. The Epox worked out of the box I've now also have the 8kha+.

Hard drives if someone tries to sell you an old ide Fujitsu shoot them. Luckily they don't make them anymore becuase they couldn't. IBM GXP as others have said here dodgy three out four I've got have had the DFT program run on them several times to correct bad sectors.
It seems very hard these days to get a good hard drive whether it's heat issue or hard drive manufacters realising that the drives there selling are so big many won't fill them up so they just make them less reliable to force the upgrade. The last bit of that is slightly tongue in cheek by the way.

[TnT]

I have an older Soyo mobo, works fine, most of the problems are VIA + Creative related. There is one slight problem where sometimes it won't post on the first boot of the morning. This only happens after I turn off the computer for the night and then turn it on in the morning. If I turn it off during the day and then turn it on later in the evening it always posts. Kind of a strange problem.

I think my bro has an old Epox that hasn't had any problems.

I'm boycotting ASUS because of they were willing to release drivers that outright let people cheat (seeing through walls) in FPS games. Don't know if they still have those drivers out though.

[RichL]

Current Mobo is an Epox EP8KTA3+. Very nice, my only niggle with it is that although it has 4 DIMM slots (one of the reasons I bought it over an ABIT/ASUS) but according to the manual you can only use 3 of them at a time.

HDDs, I currently have a pair of Maxtor 30gb 7200rpm drives that have worked flawlessly both as single and RAIDed pair.
Before that I had a Quantum 20gb 7200rpm that was also very good. I bought an Excelstor (Nee Conner) 20gb 5400 cheapie for my dads pc. It works, but its neither fast or quiet.
The Maxtors & Quantums I've got are virtually noiseless. The Conner sounds like a rusty lawnmower.

[Wombat]

Rich, you can use all 4 slots on that board. The issue is that it can only support 6 banks. Double-sided DIMMS are 2 banks, and single-sided are 1 bank. In my 8KTA3 I have 1 2-sided 256MB DIMM, and 2 1-sided 128MB DIMMS. I can add any DIMM into my machine, and as long as I put the 128MB sticks in DIMM slots 3&4, I'll be fine.

[GT98]

I had an Abit BH6..great board and lasted 3 years, till the day I took it over my GF place and it died..not sure why it did that. I went from a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450mhz to P3-something or another OC to 600mhz and finally a Celeron2 566 overclocked to 976 or so.

I got a KG-7 RAID for my current set up..I'm pretty neutral about the board...its ok so far, but I cant run WinXP for more then a month before it dies a horrible death. I can run Win2K all day and push it hard without any problems though. I'm thinking about replacing it with an Asus A7S333 in the near future though.

I replaced my GF PC with a ECS K75SA board with a Duron 900 in it and it runs like a top. Shes not really a power user (email and the web) but she has no problems with it.

In my first job I had in the IT field we used nothing but ASUS boards...the P2B and P3B. Those are some of the best boards I've ever worked with and partly influancing my purcashing of my new A7S333.

[God_Devil_Morta]

Hmmm I'm leaning back towards Asus myself, My Abit board is rock solid, but its the BH6, from what I hear that you guys are saying recent Abits are a no no, I looked a prices for Soyo boards....GODS too pricey for me and I really don't need the extra features.

[rugger]

Gigabyte boards are reasonable. We have had a few fail at work, but this is after a few years. My own board (an LX board) works very well.

AOpen boards are also reasonable. Solid, fast, I am using one right now (AK 33 with duron 700 CPU)

ASUS boards are in general also very good. We had a few problems with AMD intergrated boards from ASUS, but otherwise they have been very solid and fast.

[DGhost]

might as well chime in my $.02...

Abit: they *used* to make good boards. then they released the BP6, and most boards since have sucked. part of that was the switch away from the intel chipsets (intel provides much tighter guidelines on board design than VIA). saw a large number of VIA boards that would die and kill processors. most of the older BX stuff worked wonderfully well. their new intel boards probably are pretty good. i would not touch any of their AMD boards to save my life, though. also seen issues with older boards dying suddenly.

Asus: pricey boards that have good (albeit sometimes strange due to the OEM focus) hardware design. on the other hand i have seen a lot of really messed up things coming from their BIOS (ignoring boot order and forcing booting off of NIC, dropping every PCI device except for the video adaptor if the second serial port is disabled, etc). Also, a lot of Asus boards i have worked on refuse to work with reference drivers, and they can be slow on updating their drivers. they are usually pretty quick to adopt new features. unfortunatly, the boards are no longer anything special and personally the cost difference isn't justified.

Epox: excellent boards, although the place i work at stopped selling them to a higher than normal DOA rate that started with the last shipments of the 8KTA3 and 8K7A's before the 8KHA+'s came out. still been having a lot of problems with their boards as of recent... we had like 50-60% of a shipment of KL-133M's come back with the same problem (system hangs and video dies after being on for a little while). when their boards work, they work excellently (and overclock well)... the 8K7A is easily one of the best motherboards i have ever seen. used to have excellent support as well.

FIC: usually nothing to write home about. good oem boards that are usually pretty stable (especially after 1-2 bios updates). they are also pretty hellish about RMA's.

Gigabyte: usually feature packed, and unlike MSI boards they don't have a different model for each feature. generally not top performers, but my experience shows them to be pretty stable. dunno about bios support for them, but i know they are hellish about RMA's. as was mentioned earlier in the thread, they do tend to die after a couple years of use.

IWill: excellent engineering, their BIOS usually has some small issues, their support is pretty lacking (they stopped releasing new bios updates for the KK266 line within a year of its release), but when they work they run like a bat out of hell compared to other boards of the same chipset (CL3 PC133 memory scores rivaled CL2 PC133 scores on other boards w/ the KK266). only real issue i have with them besides their bios support is their choice of chipsets (use of AMI raid controller on early raid boards (changed to highpoint fairly recently), use of ALi chipsets).

MSI: quirky boards. they may require tweaking (or not tweaking, depending on the board) to make it work correctly. beyond that, i've found them rock solid stable, especially after a couple bios updates and properly tweaked/configured. they usually also have everything but the kitchen sink in their high end models. i have a MSI 694D-A (iirc) that has not given me any problems working at stock speeds. considering that it was the second mass produced VIA based dual processor board on the market (first being the Tyan Tiger 133), its pretty impressive. be careful which boards you buy, as their naming/model scheme isn't that great and many vendors will jack it up.

Tyan: stable boards after a few revisions. also CPU support is usually pretty limited unless you have the latest revision of the board (at least with the P3/K6 boards). little on the pricey side and not OC friendly.

ECS: never played around with them too much, but i am not a fan of their board designs. low cost motherboards, you get what you pay for.

Azza: again, another low cost board maker. you get what you pay for. performance isn't as good as others, but they work and seem to be fairly reliable. certainly nothing to write home about.

about the IBM GXP's... honestly, at the place i work at we have not seen the dreaded problems that so many people seem to have been having with them. i do believe that they are a bit more sensitive than other drives to environmental things, such as static and impacts. i managed to cause 3-7mb of bad sectors on 3 different IBM drives just by moving the drive cage they were mounted in. only guess is that it was static shock. go figure.

[orangejulius]

Abit LX6 - bad memory slot
Abit BH6 - bad memory slot

Several WD Caviars - much data loss due to head crashes, never again.
Maxtors have been fine.

[Electric Amish]

Abit:

4- BH6's all ran fine
1- BE6 ran fine
2- ZM6 ran fine
2- KA7 Both seemed ok, tho one had some quirks, but it may have just been my tweaking.

Biostar:

1- Socket A has been fine since Christmas
1- Slot 1 has been fine for over a year
5- Socket 370's all ran fine

Soyo:

1- Was killed when a PS died.

ECS:

2 (K75SA)- Both running fine

Asus:

2- A7V133 no problems

Epox:

2- 8KHA+ no problems
1- 8KHAL no problems

Shuttle:

1- AK31 rev3 runs fine, but has a noisy PCI bus. I have to run my G400 @ 1x AGP

========================

Maybe I'm just lucky?

amish

[Wombat]

<I>FIC VA-503+ (rev 1.1b)</I> = worked great. The CE rev. of the MVP3 chipset was actually pretty good. The board only did AGP 1x, but that was the only problem.

<i>MSI-6167</i> - Fantastic board. All AMD inside. Rock solid, incredible performance, but not much of an overclocker. Had to give it up to get support for higher bus speeds

<i>Epox 8KTA3</I> - Another great board. Never fails on me, and the diagnostic readout was great when I was trying to find the limits of my hardware. Lots of tweakability for performance and FSB, as well as voltage. Since George Breese's patch it's been very usable, but VIA's IDE drive performance absolutely sucks compared to the amazing throughput of the Irongate/Viper combo. I don't even try doing on-the-fly copies with this board, even though the 6167 would do it with almost no speed hit compared to doing an HD->CDR burn.

[jackzod]

Abit: BH6: rock-solid
BF6: burned out..

Asus: A7V: the hardest to make work i ever owned, picky on
memory, picky on vid card, cold boot problem. and the
list goes on. (replaced it after 1 months)

MSI: stable, but in my case they didn't last (burned 2 socket A)
my friends alltogether burned 3, so in my experience no
durability there.

gigabyte: actual mobo GA 7DXR+ is rock stable, and doin fine so
far
Owned one gigabyte board in the past for my P1 and
its still running.

[Greebe]

MSI 6167, 6195 and the 6561... work great

Mtech mustang r581a Socket 7 (not super) AGP1x only... worked a peach and is still going (the only S7 that I know of with an AGP slot)

BH6... needs caps.. Abit, not as good as they use to be

PcChips... ack... cacheless dummy chips, will never forgive them for that

Asus.. OK... K7M sucked for the first 6 months ate up with BIOS problems... could never get over how cramped that board was

Gigabyte... OK

[Pace]

There hasn't been much mention of SuperMicro. Similar to Tyan I suppose, their main market is the server arena. I had a BX board (guess what, rock solid! ). I've only had 2 problems. 1 was with my own BX board, after I shorted some stuff inside attaching a fan whilst computer was on. Killed my hard drive, and floppy controller went too, or soon after I think.

The other problem was a jumper fell off the board, to do with keyboard wakeup. Meant system wouldn't boot, couldn't make much sense out of it - emailed them - great support.

I've never mailed any other mobo manuf., but I'd think SM will rank amongst the best.

You said overclock? No chance

Edits:

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

What's it like on video editing and Photoshop?

Also, EEs, what do bad caps look like? A few on my board (Abit ) have brown tops, they busted? I'm going to take a closer look later, see what it is.