How to Choose a Motherboard

rush21hit

Honorable
Mar 5, 2012
580
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11,160
In my 13 years experience as a cyber cafe owner, mainstream barebone boards tend to survive longer. Mainly due to their restriction by being a barebone option in the first place.

Except for A55. It shares the same odd problems as its higher tier boards; unusual CPU overheat. I had to swap the APU in and out between rigs, despite them being the exact same spec. As to why, your guess is as good as mine.

That, and the A78 boards. At this point, I believe that this particular chipset has a built in self-destruct mechanism once it passes its warranty period.
 

Baltazar404

Reputable
Feb 3, 2015
9
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4,510
I had a real nice MoBo (LGA 1150/Haswell) from Gigabyte, but I'm getting very disappointed, that their boards don't last long.
 

Baltazar404

Reputable
Feb 3, 2015
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4,510
I used to by Gigabyte almost exclusively, avoided some other brands, because I got used to their BIOS and kinda knew what to expect. The board that I just had for maybe 2yrs now just went dead one morning. This isn't the first that gave up on me, the board before I got this died also and only worked for about 2 years. Meanwhile I aquired another board that I didn't use first (asrock), because it has a lot of limitations including lacking enough USB 3.0 connections and being a microATX, everything used to be jammed in, forget about nice cable wiring management, because of the awkward placements of the connections. At the end, the microatx board that I wasn't really a fan of survived 2 gigabyte boards already, which both featured far more extendability and features.
 

hamoo

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2014
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18,530
the one terrible experience i had with motherboards was the hot hot southbridge. i realize that chipsets have changed since then, but i am twice shy. i want to know which motherboard manufacturers have the coolest running chipsets. that's my primary consideration, just as with a case, my primary consideration is not having a plastic on / off switch. i guess that now the hottest components on motherboards are vrm mosfets. how do i find out how hot these components get for a comparison of these brands ? i am guessing that the chipset temperature may be correlated with the board's power consumption, so i would like to see those numbers also:
ASRock
GIGABYTE
MSI
ASUS