[SOLVED] How many are ready to ditch Intel because of them no longer support or providing drivers?

[Starnet]

I have repurposed motherboards and processors over the years. Now that Intel has decided to remove support and all drivers for their systems no longer produced from their web sites will this effect you decision to not buy their products in the future. For me this is a major issue, consider this a used intel motherboard for the most part is worthless if you cant get drivers for it. Now 3rd parties are offering drivers but how safe are they or even some are a scam asking you to pay for them. I never asked Intel to provide tech support over the phone but I did in many cases download drivers for system boards I had. Even the tools they provide to check your drivers are worthless saying access to their server is denied. So much for Intel, I will be taking a closer look at 3rd party mb vendors and Intel can suck it. In a way this shows how stupid they aare, AMD has made major strides in closing gap in processors, add the fact they are way cheaper and Intel's new position on support, bye bye for me!

 

[boju]

Intel stopped making motherboards awhile ago so if you keep to the main 3rd part vendors ie Asus, ASRock, Msi and Gigabyte, you'll have much longer support.

 

[Starnet]

Intel stopped making motherboards awhile ago so if you keep to the main 3rd part vendors ie Asus, ASRock, Msi and Gigabyte, you'll have much longer support.

Very true, one thing about Intel motherboards they were not the fastest by any means but they were for the most part bulletproof. Great to be use with home automation where it runs 24x7 or multi media interface units behind big screen tv's and what not. Well, another giant has suffered a brain stroke when it comes to legacy customer support and they are to stupid to see it. Oh well, so much for the rant. I do hope some executive pin head might pick up when enough people say Intel no more. Needless to say I will begin to start using some of the other vendors you mentioned using AMD cpu's.

 

[throwawayaccnt]

I have repurposed motherboards and processors over the years. Now that Intel has decided to remove support and all drivers for their systems no longer produced from their web sites will this effect you decision to not buy their products in the future. For me this is a major issue, consider this a used intel motherboard for the most part is worthless if you cant get drivers for it. Now 3rd parties are offering drivers but how safe are they or even some are a scam asking you to pay for them. I never asked Intel to provide tech support over the phone but I did in many cases download drivers for system boards I had. Even the tools they provide to check your drivers are worthless saying access to their server is denied. So much for Intel, I will be taking a closer look at 3rd party mb vendors and Intel can suck it. In a way this shows how stupid they aare, AMD has made major strides in closing gap in processors, add the fact they are way cheaper and Intel's new position on support, bye bye for me!

are you honestly asking if drivers from motherboard makers like Asus or Gigabyte are scamming you and making you pay for driver updates?

 

[Starnet]

Its been a number of years since I shared my dissatisfaction with Intel driver support practices I have noticed the other motherboard manufactures seem to have stepped up their game in keeping drivers online for their discontinued motherboards. This situation is also very evident in old motherboard sales on ebay and such.

Intel motherboards without a drivers disk are nearly a give away item where ASUS performance boards sell at values not to far off from their original costs.

Bottom line, customer support is becoming more and more important and just because a motherboard is no longer in production doesn't make it junk (unless its an intel motherboard without drivers) lol

 

[TerryLaze]

Is there even any mobo that doesn't get completely recognised by any modern-ish OS?
Drivers get downloaded automatically.
The amount of chipsets used are extremely limited and drivers for them will be drivers for them no matter if they come from intel or from some other maker.

Also I'm pretty sure that you can find any driver you want on the internet from any discontinued product ever.

 

[hotaru.hino]

So the funny thing about chipset drivers is, it doesn't matter who you get it from, as long as it's for the proper chipset. Heck, this applies to really any driver package.

To show this, I looked around for Z170 chipset drivers (mostly because this was the last platform from Intel I bought) from Gigabyte, ASRock, and ASUS. They all had the same version available: 10.1.1.38. Ran an MD5 hashing tool and... they're all the same. Which means the installer is the same. Sure the ASUS one has one more executable, but it just launches the actual driver installer.

So even if Intel doesn't have drivers for a particular chipset, if another manufacturer has it, then it'll work. And it doesn't really make sense that there's anything bespoke or magical about the drivers you get from other board makers: if you can distribute one set of drivers across the entire platform, that's less work for you to do.

 

[Starnet]

Is there even any mobo that doesn't get completely recognised by any modern-ish OS?
Drivers get downloaded automatically.
The amount of chipsets used are extremely limited and drivers for them will be drivers for them no matter if they come from intel or from some other maker.

Also I'm pretty sure that you can find any driver you want on the internet from any discontinued product ever.

To a degree your statement is true, unfortunately this is not always the case especially if your trying to run say Windows 7 (and you can totally forget XP) and yes before someone corrects me I no they are both end of life and no longer supported.

But here is a good comparison Intel drops ALL drivers for their motherboards off their web side once the product is no longer produced and deemed EOL. Not so with ASUS, I can find motherboards that have been out of production for well over 10 years and just about everything you can think of for Operating systems and drivers as well as old BIOS versions are still there. Gigabyte though not as complete has old drivers too.

Yes there are also many sites that can provide drivers for motherboards but I am amazed how many have been compromised with hacked drivers.

It is true it does cost money for companies to store data on Web servers but face it once the drivers are created and posted not really. Especially when you consider they have to have current products listed.

Personally, I have a real problem with this EOL issues that both Microsoft and Intel push. To me its just a way to force consumers to trash perfectly good working hardware and software just to buy new stuff.

In a world were we are worrying about global warming, recycling and whatnot why not push using things to
the point where they are no longer usable or create a hazard to those using them.

Just looking at things from a responsible position, waste not want not!

 

[hotaru.hino]

Personally, I have a real problem with this EOL issues that both Microsoft and Intel push. To me its just a way to force consumers to trash perfectly good working hardware and software just to buy new stuff.

In a world were we are worrying about global warming, recycling and whatnot why not push using things to
the point where they are no longer usable or create a hazard to those using them.

Just looking at things from a responsible position, waste not want not!

The problem is because there's an arms race between responsible people who want to use computers for beneficial things and people who want to steal every cent you have out of your bank account. New attacks require new security features to combat them, which requires either new hardware or software support. And sometimes one or the other requires such a rewrite of how things are done that it's more work to drop it in place than it is to push out a brand new product.

If you think software EOL is bad on Microsoft's end, you should look at FOSS. Granted while most FOSS software makes source files of their software available for all versions, if you're just an average user, your software is basically EOL sometimes within a half year (take a look at Ubuntu's version history) And good luck if you let your software go without updates long enough and the changed the repo URLs.