Question for quality builders with +5 years experience

[MrsD]

5 msi boards running 2 barton 2500, athlon 1.4, a64 3200+ and a a64 x2 3800+
Not one single problem with them.

Same here Ive had at least 6 msi boards, never had one die yet.

MSI and Asus boards *shiver*... i'll never buy from them again. Sure, they work great for a couple months...and then they die. I guess i just got bad luck, but don't understand how anyone can even think about buying from those manufacturers...

I wouldnt think of buying anything else, msi that is

 

[crazyhandpuppet]

I have had good luck with DFI and Biostar and horrible luck with Epox and ECS. I have had mixed problems with Asus. Generally, I'd say 95% of my boards work just fine on installation, though I have noticed that some come with odd configurations (jumper settings and such) that need to be corrected before the board is installed.

 

[Avadann_Kedeth]

In my 10 or so years of building and my 2 years of professional tech work I haven't found anyhting to be the perfect solution. I normally prefer ASUS, but I've had those fail on me too. Vertain models are of course better then others within a brand.

Gigabye (lots of nice features for a low price. You get what you pay for).
ECS, PCchips, and the "ones you've never heard of" have always been rather unreliable too.

My point is brand is very important, so pick a good one, but byond that make sure the specific version of the model you want is good. ASUS might be great and my favourite blah blah blah, but the P5GDC was a nightmare. I had several of those fail on me at work.

I always look at ASUS first. They can be a little more expensive, but bang for the buck balances with them quite well. Of course there's DFI for those with deeper pockets than mine, but nevertheless a good choice. Tyan makes good dual socket boards, but I don't mess witht hem for anything else. MSI and Abit I kind of hold about equally. MSI is known for DOA, but if you get a working one they tend to be pretty reliable, and they have good feature sets. (And they look friggin sweet!). Abit is another decent choice, but they tend to be on the cheaper side of things and take a few shortcuts.

Bottom line, research by model more than by brand. I bought an A8N5X; why? Because it was a brand I'm most comfortable with, that had the features I wanted, within my price range, and it got good reviews from most sources. It always a bit of a risk, but we do what we can to minimize that.

Constant Vigilance,

 

[Scooby2]

Without doubt MSI.

I've seen so many of thier boards fail due to bad capacitors its not funny.

[first build 386 16mhz ]

 

[vimka]

I'm talking about boards that are sold in a cardboard box, not ones that come in comodity Dells or HPs etc.

I realize Dell's are crap, but this thread is about boards from the companies that aren't White-Box Machines.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

I believe Dell buys cheap Foxconn boards and uses those in their systems.

 

[bliq]

I think it's always going to be all over the map- just like the old engineer's addage: price, performance, reliability, you can choose any 2 you want...

Personally, I'm not a system builder per se, but I've done more than 300 builds in the last decade. I've had great luck with ECS, I've had an Epox board go bad, and they replaced it immediately, I'm still using a great gigabyte GA-8KNXP, and well, I agree, I'm not too keen on PCChips. But for all mission critical machines (most of my builds are custom machines needed in a hurry for work- things you can't buy off the shelf easily) I build on Asus motherboards - usually not the most full featured but always good quality in my experience.

 

[bliq]

I believe Dell buys cheap Foxconn boards and uses those in their systems.

Dell actually contracts with Intel to build their motherboards to their spec.

Foxconn is one of several suppliers of PSUs to Dell. If they are also building motherboards under license from Intel (and/or Dell) that's possible too.

 

[Onus]

I haven't done a lot of regular building for some 10-12 years; one reason I'm here is to catch up. I want to say back in the early '90s we gave up on MSI because of DOA problems, but I couldn't swear that was the brand, and boards today aren't the ones from '91 anyway.
After some research, I used Abit for my two recent builds, but that's not a sufficient sample, nor is 4-5 months enough time to generalize; still, until given good reason, I'll probably stick with Abit.

 

[Mobius]

Tyan, Asus, Shuttle, Abit, DFI, Jetway, Biostar, Epox, and PCChips

I have absolutely no idea why you'd waste your time with the boards I bolded above. Were you building servers or something?

I've been building PCs since 1977, and in that time I have "switched brands" many, many times. I generally recommend only one brand for each CPU manufacturer. Currently I'm well impressed with Gigabyte boards, and video cards. Their passive cooling policies are excellentm, and their quality is second to none.

Asus I no longer touch, after a lot of problems with south bridges - and poor audio support, as well as numerous problems with "incompatible" (!!) RAM. I wouldn't touch an Asus video card if you paid me. They always seem very noisy.

I used Epox for some time - but the name puts me off! 😛 They were good boards for a while, but I haven't touched one in 3 years. At one point I remember overclocking an Athlon T-Bird by 70% on an Epox board! My client was very happy indeed.

You can never go wrong with an Intel board - that's one thing I've learned. I have never, never, ever had an Intel Mobo problem (except not being able to overclock!) and I guess I have specified intel motherboards in around 200+ PCs over the years.

 

[s4fun]

Intel boards are way overpriced and they can't be overclocked? No wonder I never ever buy Intel boards.

 

[Wgfalcon]

iv'e built with biostar, ecs, asus, and gigabyte my only problem was with lack of bios support for biostar. my last 2 personel boxes have been gigabyte both work great without issues. my next build is the foxcon am2 board, hopfully my luck holds out 😀

holy crusader has it right though the powersupply is the heart of any system never skimp there and you'll be ahead of the game

 

[mnem0nic]

Tyan, Asus, Shuttle, Abit, DFI, Jetway, Biostar, Epox, and PCChips

I have absolutely no idea why you'd waste your time with the boards I bolded above. Were you building servers or something?

With Tyan boards, yes, building servers. They are my favorite server board maker. Absolutely zero failures or problems in about 50 server builds. I'm using a 'recycled' (client wanted an upgrade) dual PIII 800 (slot) Tyan server as my work machine. Solid and flawless, and remarkably quick for its age.

The rest you bolded, and including Epox, I picked up in bulk when I bought someone else's "going out of business" inventory (and shortly discovered why they went out of business). It's pretty interesting to me that you picked almost all of them out of that list.

I've been building PCs since 1977

No you haven't. Check your dates. The first IBM PC wasn't even available for sale until 1981, the first clone wasn't available unitl 1982, and the first generic individual PC motherboard with bios wasn't available for some years after that.

 

[HoldenMcGroin]

I have had no end of trouble with DFI motherboards. I think they make some of the nicest looking boards, but they can be too finicky and are prone to break. My brother and I took about a week each working on a DFI LAN Party board for my dad's computer. Tried every single setting until finally got it to work after 2 weeks. I hoped it was a fluke and I bought a DFI for my acrylic case. That MB crashed and is now sitting pretty but not working.
I've also had trouble getting some cheap ECS boards to recognize the full speed of certain CPUs and will stay away from these as well.

 

[MasterLee]

I checked my records and found that indeed I have had Asus failures, but only with the VIA Chipset, never with an Nvidia Chipset. As a matter of fact I've only had problems with the VIA Chipset boards and that's from different manufacturers, is that what you have found ?

 

[phreejak]

I've used just three boards in the years I've been building computers: Abit, MSI and ASUS. Of the 3, I've had the most issues with ASUS as, it seems, their neverending quest to put out the first boards of any given chipset has put their quality control into question - case in point, the terrible job of quality controlt hat they did with their recent 975x board with the Marvell controllers - something that they should have known when the board was issued.

Of the 3, I favor Abit the most, not only because of the quality of their boards but they have, in my experience, very good technical support, very helpful forums and excellent customer service. I've never had any problems with MSI's products but I don't purchase them in any frequency.

 

[computertech82]

Dell should be added to the list of bad boards. I don't do IT at work, but as of now one by one over the last nine month there are more than 10% of the Dell boards have exhibited the exploded or popped capacitors syndrome, and they are all roughly in the 2.5 to 3rd year of use when it happens. The company is getting them replaced by Dell because they paid for the service contract, but the bottom line is that is not a question of if you board will go and it is matter of when. And Dells attitude toward the whole thing is Dell will send a guy out to replace a board when the board goes, mean while the "next up" software and hardware engineers lose 2 days waiting for that guy. And this is after paying for the service contract. Dell's deals and low come on price don't look all that great in this light.

LOFL. Dell doesn't make anything. The motherboards are Intel. The only thing dell does is put it together, and stick their name on everything... nothing more.

 

[chunkymonster]

I've put together a few dozen machines over the years and have had the best experiences/results with Tyan, Asus, and Abit. For stability and longevity, Tyan is #1 followed by Asus. For balls to the wall performance and features, I'd say Abit and Asus are about tied. I've had the least success with MSI, Epox, and PCChips. I think Gigabyte mobos are over rated. Put together a few low-end Skt 754 machines with ECS mobos and they are still humming along. Never tried any DFI products but am interested in an X2 or AM2 OC'ing gaming machine based on a DFI, maybe the LANParty series. Currently, I am running a Tyan mobo in my home workstation/file server and an Abit in my HTPC.