VOGONS


Your most shitty motherboard?

Topic actions

First post, by vetz

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Let your frustration come forward, take it out in this thread.

Tell us, what are the most shitty motherboards you have layed your hands upon?

Mine have to be the Epox MVP3E-M. An ATX Super socket 7 board.

1998 review here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/156

It is just so damn picky with hardware! I was planning on using this as my Socket 7 test rig, but I've put that idea behind me after working a bit with this board. I put in my AWE 64 Gold and my 3COM Etherlink card conflicts without Windows being able to sort it out. I put in my S3 Virge GX2 and suddenly my Silicon Image S-ATA card won't be recognized at all. Set in my SCSI controller card along with my S-ATA card and S-ATA doesn't work. If I put in my CMI8330 card then all PCI/AGP videocards that uses IRQ gets moved to IRQ 14 or 15 which crashes with the IDE controller. You can't manually set IRQ's in the BIOS. VIA's USB drivers I never have gotten to work in Windows 98. S3 Virge DX cards crashes with EMM386.EXE. 😵

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 2 of 75, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Lots. The boards with unusable PCI take the cake. I had a Supermicro 440FX that caused most video cards to be unstable and display corruption. And I've used VIA boards which had PCI so fubar that PCI sound cards couldn't even output Windows sounds.

Reply 3 of 75, by Anonymous Coward

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Weird. Supermicro is usually pretty solid, and 440FX should have been solid too.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 4 of 75, by DonutKing

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

ECS K7S5A for me.

I researched before I bought it, half the reviews said it was crap, half said it was great.
I took a gamble and bought one as I was on a tight budget and couldn't afford DDR RAM at the time, so I reused some old PC133 from my previous PC.
Even when it was brand new it would randomly fail to POST. I had a TruePower 430W PSU which was one of the better PSU's available at the time so I know it wasn't that. That PSU survived long after the board did and I never had trouble with it.
I had a few other quirks as well, eventually it died altogether.

I read somewhere that there were at least 2 factories producing this board and some had more stringent quality control than the others which accounts for the mixed reviews of the board - if you were lucky enough to get a good one it could go for ages, if you were unlucky you could get a lemon.

When it finally died I replaced it with an A7V333 which was quite good except the PS2 ports died on it for some reason, I just used a USB keyboard/mouse so no big deal there.
I got an Abit NF7 after that with a Barton 2800+ which was probably the best Athlon board I had, and then I moved to the Intel camp and got a Core 2 duo.

I actually just replaced my Asus P8P67M-PRO in my main PC last night as it started doing something strange where the screen would just go blank randomly. Video card, PSU ,RAM, CPU all tested good, no visual damage like bulging caps or anything so I swapped it out for a P8Z77-VLX which has been running perfectly. Although the previous board worked pretty well until it started playing up, it was less than 2 years old.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 5 of 75, by NamelessPlayer

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member
SPBHM wrote:

PC chips M598...

slow, unstable...

And the layout for the various AT port headers is TERRIBLE, to boot. One cable was sandwiched between some of the expansion slots, making for a tight fit if said slots were occupied. And god help you if that cable should get unplugged by accident while working inside, for any reason...

Not having a proper AGP slot also sucked (especially when the SiS 530 is so terrible that it loses DirectDraw acceleration if you update past DirectX 7), and the CPU socket was in the way of some of the PCI slots, potentially blocking the installation of longer cards.

To think it formed the basis of my first computer...my father clearly cheaped out on me there, what with that crappy board with no AGP slot and the use of an AT case and PSU in the late 1990s, by which time ATX were the norm.

Reply 6 of 75, by Standard Def Steve

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I'm sure I'm missing a few here, but:

-Asus SPAX(?) an OEM ATX board used in older HP K6-2 machines. It only supported 66MHz FSB processors, used a SiS chipset with a painfully slow IGP and the worst integrated audio I'd ever heard. Memory bandwidth was absolutely pathetic, especially when the IGP was enabled. That thing was powered by a K6-2 300/66, but felt more like a Pentium 100. Windows' GUI actually slowed down whenever I ran Winamp! My P2-233 certainly didn't have trouble with MP3s!

-Some ECS Socket A board. I don't recall the exact model, but it took PC133 memory. I ran an Athlon XP 2000+ and 9800Pro on that board for a couple of years. It was a reasonably stable board, but definitely slow for an Athlon XP-based machine. The PIII-S machine that I have now, clocked 80MHz lower, outperforms it.

-ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA. It was an interesting looking product, and cheap to boot, so I bought one. It supported DDR1 and DDR2; AGP and PCIe; Pentium 4 and Core 2 Quad. Unfortunately, it was slow and unstable. I ran a C2D E4400 on it with an AGP 6800GT. Performance was well below that of my NF3/X2-4600 machine, and 2D GUI performance was also very poor. Perhaps I should've used a PCIe card.

-QDI Advance 12. Apollo Pro 266 based. Very, very fast, but also very unreliable. It ran a PIII-1200 @ 1350/150 along with a gig of CL2 PC2100. Performance was absolutely great when it worked. Half the time it wouldn't POST, and it almost never would come back to life from a Windows restart.

Reply 7 of 75, by JayCeeBee64

User metadata
Rank Retired
Rank
Retired

ECS K7S5A for me as well. Ugh, some very bad memories are coming back to me now... 😵

The only good thing about it was when I took it out of the box for the first time. It was all downhill from then on. Half the memory wasn't recognized at random. Hard drives disappeared and reappeared like magic. The built-in nic dropped in and out of existence in device manager. Video and audio would stop working for no reason at all. And after about 3 weeks of constant fighting, it simply died. To make things worse, the computer place where I bought it went out of business, and ECS never answered my requests for an RMA. So I did the only thing left to do: took it out to the backyard and laid it on top of a concrete slab. Mr. bad ECS board, meet Mr. Baseball Bat..... 😏

I felt sooo much better afterwards.

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 9 of 75, by elfuego

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

1st and foremost: Chaintech 5AGM2 - don't touch this piece of junk even with a pointy stick.

2nd on the list - PC Chips M810L (SiS 730s). It had everything integrated, but also an AGP slot. I inserted GF2MX and used for a while until the board went dead. I received a replacement - and whoopsala: the GF 2 MX won't fit in the slot anymore (there was a capacitor blocking the slot!). I changed the board a couple of times more for different revisions - and no video card fit in any other revision of the board except for the first rev, that they didnt have anymore. About that time I moved on to KT266A and never looked back. 😀

Reply 10 of 75, by PcBytes

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
elfuego wrote:

1st and foremost: Chaintech 5AGM2 - don't touch this piece of junk even with a pointy stick.

2nd on the list - PC Chips M810L (SiS 730s). It had everything integrated, but also an AGP slot. I inserted GF2MX and used for a while until the board went dead. I received a replacement - and whoopsala: the GF 2 MX won't fit in the slot anymore (there was a capacitor blocking the slot!). I changed the board a couple of times more for different revisions - and no video card fit in any other revision of the board except for the first rev, that they didnt have anymore. About that time I moved on to KT266A and never looked back. 😀

Mine was a MSI 6163 PII board.That was my nightmare untill I swapped for a P2B,and so one to the present,when I now use a Jetway J993AN board.The only nice feature on the MSI board was it's leds it had.It came IIRC from a Packard Bell PC,as the bios had a fullscreen logo with it.I don't have it anymore.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 11 of 75, by ratfink

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Standard Def Steve wrote:

-ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA.

haha i'm using one as a windows 2000 right with a prescott and fx5950u. seems fine for that purpose.

My baddies:

a jetway socket a - the caps mushroomed soon after i got it. that was my intro to caps plague. damn annoying as the next ones i bought were only 1.5v agp

asrock k7s8x socket a - seemed to get various compatibility issues with addon cards. ok if i kept it simple and basic.

fic pa2013 socket 7 - horribly unstable, unable to run voodoo banshee or even s3 trio without frequent, random lockups.

ecs am2 micro-atx that died within 3 months

asrock alivedual-esata2 - used to love the flexibility of agp and pci-e, but once i upgraded to a phenom it was clearly not a great performer. kind-of in two minds about including it cos it was a godsend in its day [upgrade market around transition to am2 and pci-e]

Reply 13 of 75, by Legacysystem

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

MSI PM8PM-V. Probably it has the weakest capacitors on earth. Too underperforming motherboard.

Ancient system: Intel D865GLC + P4-EE (SL7CH Gallatin) + HD 4670 AGP + 4 GB DDR400 RAM + 256 GB Corsair Neutron SSD + 3 * 320 GB IDE PATA WD HDD

Retro system 2: ASRock ConRoe865PE + Q6600 (SL9UM)+ HD 3850 AGP + 4 GB DDR400 RAM + 120 GB Kingston SSD

Reply 14 of 75, by mkarcher

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t
DonutKing wrote on 2013-03-29, 02:43:

ECS K7S5A for me.

I researched before I bought it, half the reviews said it was crap, half said it was great.
I took a gamble and bought one as I was on a tight budget and couldn't afford DDR RAM at the time, so I reused some old PC133 from my previous PC.

I am one of the people who got lucky. My ECS K7S5A is still doing great, but I immediately expected to find this board mentioned in this thread. I have the first revision with the extremely cheap ALC100 AC97 codec (fixed 48kHz, stereo only), and without onboard LAN. I never had a board-related problem with it. Neither with the 1GHz Thunderbird processor, which I used for many years with quality PC133 RAM, nor with the XP-2200+ combined with PC266 DDR RAM. I got trouble with the later combination, but that one was clearly due to a bad memory module.

The SiS735 chipset of the K7S5A had a small time window in which is was quite competitive: It could beat the performance of the VIA KT266 if the SiS735 is used with DDR RAM, at a lower cost. As soon as the KT266A was available, that one outperformed the SiS735, and the SiS chipset was only used in budget boards. The K7S5A shows one of the problems with budget boards: Too little expenses spent in quality control.

Reply 15 of 75, by dionb

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
mkarcher wrote on 2023-04-25, 21:31:

[...]

I am one of the people who got lucky. My ECS K7S5A is still doing great, but I immediately expected to find this board mentioned in this thread. I have the first revision with the extremely cheap ALC100 AC97 codec (fixed 48kHz, stereo only), and without onboard LAN. I never had a board-related problem with it. Neither with the 1GHz Thunderbird processor, which I used for many years with quality PC133 RAM, nor with the XP-2200+ combined with PC266 DDR RAM. I got trouble with the later combination, but that one was clearly due to a bad memory module.

The SiS735 chipset of the K7S5A had a small time window in which is was quite competitive: It could beat the performance of the VIA KT266 if the SiS735 is used with DDR RAM, at a lower cost. As soon as the KT266A was available, that one outperformed the SiS735, and the SiS chipset was only used in budget boards. The K7S5A shows one of the problems with budget boards: Too little expenses spent in quality control.

SiS and ALi/ULi had some really great competitive chipsets in the early 00's but were totally let down by being ignored by major motherboard vendors, meaning most stuff with their chips on it was bottom-scraping junk.

I was also 'lucky' with K7S5A, although a good part of that luck was waiting for BIOS updates to fix the HDD corruption issue and a lot of memory stability issues. For me it was simple: I couldn't afford any Asus or Gigabyte KT266A/AMD760 boards, and this board was so cheap I could get it and a Duron to stick on it for less than the price of say an A7V266. At the time my alternative was staying with my old P3-700E.

But yeah, by then ECS was PC Chips (the K7S5A was also released as PC Chips M830) and PC Chips boards varied from eccentric via crappy to downright fraudulent. I never actually owned one of their fake cache boards, so I only had eccentric to crappy, but the M559 was a good candidate for worst board I had. Of course it had the usual wafer-thin PCB and every single chip up to and including the BIOS EEPROM was remarked to hide what it really was. But this board took the rest to the next level. It had an Utron UT801x chipset. PC Chips was - as far as I'm aware - only vendor to use any Utron chipsets. They may or may not have been a last gasp attempt by HiNT to make a Pentium chipset, in which case it was too little, too late. They were slow. OS support was awful (basically DOS and Win9x only). There was no DMA support for HDD. And then this board had DIMM slots. Looked great, but no SDRAM support, only 5V unbuffered EDO DIMMs (which were as rare as hen's teeth). Stick SDRAM in and it got fried. Great board...

Reply 16 of 75, by Rav

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Two persons got bad K7S5A?

That was a great card considering the ~40 CAD price, news and fresh in the box, at least the version I had.... I think it was a 3.0. I remember they made many revision for that one.
Not a great overclocker by default but after some hardware mods it was not bad.
I had an overclocked Athlon XP 1700+ on that board (pencil bridges to unlock the multiplier and the motherboard voltage regulator modded with a potentiometer to adjust the vcore).

The worst I got so far, let me think....

* Top of the list, would be an MSI, K8T Neo if I remember properly. It could not boot windows, fortunately I was good at using Linux and so I could use it until I replace it with something else. When I returned it, the guy who took care of selling it to me and then take it back did some talk with the distributor and I apparently ended up with a prototype/review board.

Followed by a Gigabyte B350 Gaming 3, thanks to very anaemic VRM cooling (when they replaced heatsink with decorative "heatsink". Thing was throttling easily and was also very easy to crash. So much crash and so much time wasted trying to make it more stable. (It did work better when I replaced the Ryzen 1700 for another Ryzen 1700, the latter did need less voltage for the same clock and so was easier on the VRM).

And the last shitty board I got would be my current 486 motherboard, a Acer AG1X/2 (I got what I could get... local market).
ALI1429G based, with a very big malus when switching to 40Mhz bus and a very anaemic BIOS (I think my IBM PC300GL I had back in the days was way more complete)
So still in the shitty board list, but the less bad because it actually work

Reply 17 of 75, by Cosmic

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

My only bad experience with a board was with an ECS P6SET-ML, a Slot 1 + Socket 370 combo board. It just straight up never worked. It was sold as NOS and just never worked, totally dead no matter the configuration. I've learned more since then so I want to try it again, but that's my shittiest motherboard. :)

Last edited by Cosmic on 2023-04-27, 09:59. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 18 of 75, by LSS10999

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

ASRock AM2V890-VSTA. I don't know why but it seems the board doesn't like Linux to the point that it's a deadly poison to it.

For quite a while I boot to a Linux distro to run GParted whenever I need to partition my hard disks. However, for that particular board, once I do a poweroff from Linux it would never ever boot up again.

I had two such boards, and both were killed this same way. POST cards showed nothing, and nothing external was being initialized, either. For example, normally I'd hear a spin-up noise from my optical drive the moment the system powers on, but not in this case. It feels as if the board entered some kind of invalid state that cannot be fixed by conventional means.

I also had a Foxconn board that's also using K8T890 (can't remember its detailed model name), and that one was also not friendly to Linux, either. The USB drive I used for booting cannot function on Linux, citing over-current, while all those USB ports (and the USB drive) function without major issues in Windows.

I once read an article that at one time, some motherboards vendors (notably Foxconn) were intentionally breaking DSDT for Linux in their BIOS, which probably explained the issue with Linux on that Foxconn board of mine (didn't check it in detail, though). Maybe the BIOSes of some other vendors' motherboards during that period were also kind of shady...

Those boards were all potential alternatives for my ASUS M2V which I once used for DOS gaming, as ESS Solo-1's legacy audio support works excellent with the VT8237 series southbridges. In the end the M2V remained the only viable option.

Last edited by LSS10999 on 2023-04-27, 01:04. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 19 of 75, by dj_pirtu

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Can't remember model but it's MSI SLOT A mobo with AMD Ironlake chipset. Super unstable.

No AGP-card will work with this mobo, Geforce is totally no go and Radeon 8500 almost worked with AGP 1x speed. 😁