Yes I remember that too. Their first board that I knew of was a socket A that had slots for 168 pin SDRAM and 172 pin DDR.
Here's one: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K7VT2

The only other boards I knew of like this were that Asus A7A266 and the ECS K7S5A. I owned the latter and I believe i've made my feelings about it clear previously 😀

Yea such boards are great for testing memory!

These brands are the ones I like the most
- Gigabyte (good price, good features, very stable)
- ASUS (rock-solid, good features)
- MSI (rock-solid, good features)

These brands are the ones I like the least
- Intel (virtually no features, somewhat unstable)
- ECS (VERY unstable, components are EXTREMELY failure prone)

My favourites:

Asrock - I had a cheap-seeming 462 board [K7S8X] with a SiS chipset but it ran for years without problems. Since then I've had a couple of the hybrid boards - aliveDUAL-eSATA2 in my main "family" machine and a 4coreDUAL-SATA2 in a second box. They have the PCI-E and AGP [=why I bought them of course] and seem to be big strongly-built boards compared to the K7 one They run solidly and reliably in XP. I had some problems under 2000 but I think graphics card driver issues were to blame. Long time since I looked but I think the 4core was a bit weird because though it will take something like a Q6600 it's limited to 3gb ram or some such; also the PCI-E is 4x not 16x. Doesn't seem to affect what we do with them. The alive has an nvidia chipset I think, and the 4core is VIA.

Gigabyte - from the GA5AX [SS7] and GA-686BX, both of which were problem-free for me with various ISA sound cards, Voodoo cards and GF2/G200/S3 video cards. And now I have an MA740-something, which doesn't get rave reviews on the web but in my experience gets the job done. Only hassle is it only has 1 PS/2 port, and won't boot up with a Z-board as the only keyboard. Gave me an excuse to get a nice usb mouse though 😜.

Soyo - I had an SY-5EMA+, a VIA SS7 board that worked with manufacturer's drivers and never locked up on me. 🤣

Asus - because my first PC had some old S7 board that seemed bullet-proof, and now I have an A7M266 which takes Voodoo AGP with an XP2000 [which was important to me at the time].

Abit - they seem a bit finnicky but once working, no problems. Had an AN7 [nforce2 chipset] - ran fine for years once I unplugged the motherboard speaker and/or disabled some fan check in the bios. Also the famous BP6, pain to get up and running with the faster IDE controller but once I loaded the drivers [:pppt:], ran 2000 nicely and seemed very fast for dual 500 celerons. Impressed me anyway.

Ones I avoid:

Jetway - although I had a good SS7 board from them, a later 462 developed capacitor problems [they puffed up like popcorn]. Put me right off. Some nice pcb colours though.

Biostar - had some brushes with cheap flex-ATX oem boards.

ECS - recently bought a new 6100 board that died within a month or two. Never again.

FIC - because I had a few PA-2013's, via ss7 boards, which were hopelessly unstable. That's under office work conditions as well as trying to run games. Could never really get to the bottom of it - sometimes seemed a network problem, sometimes they wouldn't boot with a banshee, then it seemed to crash when the CD was accesssed, etc etc. And always in a document you hadn't saved yet. But see above, Soyo seemed to get it right.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Possible though I don't know such a list. […]
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Possible though I don't know such a list.

However Asrock has archived all of their boards. And I mean the whole thing. Specs, BIOS files, drivers, images and whatnot:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/index.asp?s=Archives

The most obvious boards have model names with "upgrade" or "combo" or "dual" 🤣

E.g. here we have a S939 board using an ULI chipset which gives you AGP and PCIe slots!

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939Dual-VSTA

That mobo is very interesting since there's a daughter card for it which let's you use DDR2 and socket AM2 cpu's 😀 own these myself

Must fix a like and dislike list shortly and post 😉

The good:

Gigabyte: Didn't own any of these "in the day", but my last two motherboards have been great, a 965P-DS3P, and now a P55A-UD3. Stable, great overclockers, decent feature level.

Asus: Pretty much every Asus board I've owned has been tits. The only reason I went Gigabyte was because comparable Asus boards were around $50 more at the time. The Asus boards I've had include ISA486-SV2 (dead, corrosion), SP97-V (accidentally sold it along with the car it was in), P3V-4X, A7V600, and A8N-SLI.

AOpen: I didn't buy these, my dad bought them for me, but I remember that they were modestly price boards with not many features. I went through an AX6BC, and an AX4BS Pro, Slot-1 and Skt478 respectively. I don't remember having many problems with them, except that the P4 board only took SD-RAM, so was a bit of a dog.

The bad:

PC CHIPS: Owned one (got it from DonutKing actually), and it was an unstable piece of crap. Nice all-in-one w/PCI design, though shame about the execution.

HP: I bought a Socket 370 board at one point so a friend could have something to play at a LAN party I was having. Not till I got it home and eventually got it to boot did I find out it has been taken from a HP system of some sort. The board had PCB tracks running right up close to the screw holes, so it wouldn't boot if you forgot to put those fibre-washers on BOTH SIDES of the board. Even when I did get it going, it crashed alot.

The...almost forgotten?

Soyo: Dad's first Pentium 100 system had a fairly large Baby-AT Socket7 board branded Soyo. I don't remember much about it other than it was so long that it barely fit inside the case we had.

I bought an asrock pci-e + agp board for my p4
dirt cheap £29
plus you can run agp and pci-e gfx cards at the same time to power 4 monitors

I've recently been contemplating upgrading my work rig. It's a S939 with 2Gb DDR and a 400GB harddrive. This system is my offline database but the harddrive is getting really full! I love the board, but it has the VIA SATA1 controller which is very hard to get a SATA2 device running in it.
So lately I'm considering buying a cheap Asrock AM2 along with a 1.5TB Samsung harddrive. I already have all the other parts I'll need anyway, including 2x1GB DDR2-800 and a single core AM2 and should have a good PSU laying around somewhere also. Reading what people wrote about Asrock tempts me to give Asrock a try on my own accord 😉

Edit: Only thing is, I don't have a good PCI-E card yet, only some crappy turbo cache card, but since this is meant as a work rig and not for gaming, I can use that until PCI-E cards start getting dumped for cheap on the 2nd hand market once people start upgrading their rigs 😀

I don't think it makes sense to be a fan of any of these companies. An individual can't really make an informed opinion on a company because nobody owns enough of the company's products to really have a grasp of the quality level overall. You can't buy a few of their boards over 5 years and then know that the company takes quality control or customer support seriously, for example.

ASUS certainly is not exceptional. Their notebook lines have some serious QA issues. I bought a $1600 G73JH notebook last spring and went through 3 replacements before I got one that didn't have some kind of defect. There's a forum on notebookreview that is jam packed with overheating problems, key press problems, keyboard backlight failures, GPU issues, etc. If this is any indication of their other notebooks, I would suggest some serious research before buying.

In my experience, you can find decent products from almost any technology company. But this doesn't mean that everything they make is quality. Don't buy based on brand. All of the companies are cutting corners on quality and the result is often not fun to own.

While what you wrote is, in essence, true, I'd still rather not try out a board made by PC Chips, Jetway or ECS.
Some companies make it a habit to sell stuff that's the pure minimum. If they done it for 10 years, why would I buy one of their products next year?

And besides, the supply is soo vast, theres literally hundreds of boards to choose from, each with different stats. You gotta start filtering somewhere, and I might as well filter out the bad brands first 😉

No matter how much research you put into it, it still remains a gamble. I try to make the risks of losing that gamble weight against the price and time it will likely cost me

DonutKing wrote:

Gigabyte are pretty solid these days although some of their earlier stuff can be a bit shifty. I remember they came out with a 'dual power' motherboard with an optional voltage regulator module you could plug into it, and I knew a couple of people who bought them and had a lot of issues.

I would be one of those people. The mb looked kinda weird too with this extra card plugged in next to the cpu. Needless to say, one day the board just had enough and died. I didn't blame it on gigabyte per say, so i replaced it with another gigabyte 😀

Another note about preferring one manufacturer over another. It's even more significant when buying a power supply. Some manufacturers make consistent good parts (except the one lemon once in a while) while others are a feast of problems, often ending with fireworks. You can tell the REALLY ugly by them being feather-light.

Hmm lets see my probably bias opinion, I should mention that only recently did I start buying new hardware it used to be a lucky dip of what I would get in second hand/free land.

Gigabyte - If I buy a new board it is Gigabyte always Gigabyte even though I could have ended up with an ASUS board when I started buying new boards but I got a Gigabyte board because G31M-S2L was the most expensive one my sister would by for my birthday.

I also previously had liked my Gigabyte mATX Socket 370 board (cant remember what it is except it is intel815), it also happens that I have a Super Socket 7 Board that works well to except its pickness with some RAM and AGP Cards but other then that no problems with Gigabyte boards whatsoever. The only dead one I have had has always been dead so nothing to change my mind there.

Gigabyte also uses Award BIOS which I prefer over AMI BIOS since I don't like the look, I can also see me disliking UEFI because of simplified mouse controlled yuckyness (hmm maybe thats exaggeration, I dunno).

MSI - I consider them second to Gigabyte, I like the MSI boards I have encountered just not as much as Gigabyte mostly due to bias and that my mATX Socket 370 had onboard NIC and the MSI boards I encountered/had didn't which is an incredibly stupid reason especially considering the Socket 478 Gigabyte board that I got that didn't have it. Although that wasn't as bad as an LGA775 (I think) board with a P4 2.8 that didn't have onboard NIC I just couldn't understand why it was an intel board I think.

DFI - Have a Socket 478 DFI board no idea about what it is, seemed to work fine, I guess I haven't really used it terribly much it has AWARD BIOS which is automatically a plus but I doubt I would buy a DFI board when they are so expensive.

eVGA - Sound nice, AWARD BIOS, but very expensive.

Jetway - I have a socket 7 board which I use as my linux firewall which has been running fine for the last 4 years or so I think.

ASUS - Uses AMI BIOS so I avoid however I gather there boards work reasonably well.

SOLTEK - Can't really give an oppionion here but the only board I've ever had contained bad capacitors.

Intel - For some reason I just despise these boards because I think to do with not detecting certain HDDs after a while. (this wasn't at home, somewhere else) Also AMI BIOS and less options are offputting.

OEM (Compaq) - OEM boards are just horrible why why why why do I have 6 compaq (ugh its 6) boards of which only one has a decent AWARD BIOS, one is a Windows 3.1 like BIOS, and the other 4 seemed a pretty horible limited like AMI BIOS but horribler I think, If there was only a way to atleast go to an Intel AMIBIOS I would be happier particularly if I could get rid of that stupid splash screen. The board with the AWARD BIOS has a lot of bad caps but it still seems to work fine but argh no AGP same with the other compaq Socket 370 board (I didn't intend this to be a compaq rant).
The compaq deskpro 4000 is alright unless I ever have to replace that psu which has the AT power connectors and some other plug and a different sort of on switch (no 240V AC to the front of the case).
And onboard NIC which is always nice particularly when its a socket 7 board.

OEM (Other) - Had 2 Acer's one a socket 7 board which still goes well, no problems there and an Acer V80M (Slot 1, was so cheap I thought didn't even have plastic around the IDE connectors, well thats what I thought anyway) which was my first experience of bad capacitors and is why I am absolutely paranoid when a computer freezes because I remember having freezes all the time caused by the bad caps. An interesting fact was that UT would freeze when using DirectX3D but not with OpenGL.

Only had 3 other OEM board I think a Packard Bell 486 which had 98FE on it for who knowes what reason was pretty slow to start up I remember but it was 98 not 95 so obviously it must be better right? This is probably the time to admit to the fact we used Windows 3.1 up until 2000. And I belive my uncle got the Acer Pentium MMX 166 from the computer fair with 95B on it. It even had a 1 year warranty when it was a second hand computer, they don't make second hand computers like that anymore. I'm not sure how that actually is relevent but interesting anyway. So the packard Bell one was ok not really fussed I htink I had a digital 486 (i think that was what it was) that I couuld never get to work. Lastly have a Celeron 400 HP box which is so small has a real AMI BIOS so better then some options but glad I never had to use it I used the Acer V80M instead at the time.

Woah this was quite abit longer then I thought, ECS, Asrock I haven't touched either but I vaugly thought they had AMI BIOS so I run away from those I think.

Good post, awergh 😉

awergh wrote:

OEM (Compaq) - OEM boards are just horrible why why why why do I have 6 compaq (ugh its 6) boards of which only one has a dece […]
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OEM (Compaq) - OEM boards are just horrible why why why why do I have 6 compaq (ugh its 6) boards of which only one has a decent AWARD BIOS, one is a Windows 3.1 like BIOS, and the other 4 seemed a pretty horible limited like AMI BIOS but horribler I think, If there was only a way to atleast go to an Intel AMIBIOS I would be happier particularly if I could get rid of that stupid splash screen. The board with the AWARD BIOS has a lot of bad caps but it still seems to work fine but argh no AGP same with the other compaq Socket 370 board (I didn't intend this to be a compaq rant).
The compaq deskpro 4000 is alright unless I ever have to replace that psu which has the AT power connectors and some other plug and a different sort of on switch (no 240V AC to the front of the case).
And onboard NIC which is always nice particularly when its a socket 7 board.

OEM (Other) - Had 2 Acer's one a socket 7 board which still goes well, no problems there and an Acer V80M (Slot 1, was so cheap I thought didn't even have plastic around the IDE connectors, well thats what I thought anyway) which was my first experience of bad capacitors and is why I am absolutely paranoid when a computer freezes because I remember having freezes all the time caused by the bad caps. An interesting fact was that UT would freeze when using DirectX3D but not with OpenGL.

Often you can disable the splash screen in the BIOS. The win 3.10-alike BIOS you described was AMI's windows BIOS. It may not be very handy, but for some reason I like those 😀

About changing BIOS, you can actually flash a different BIOS to your board, but it comes with risks.

Lol! Nobody has mentioned Dell yet!
Only thing I can add about Dell, I hate their stuff being proprietary. Their boards often have non-standard i/o thingies, often need Dell PSU's, often come in (not always ugly) cases you can't even put a different board in, not to mention that, as with other oems, they have limited BIOS options.
For some reason I always liked Packard Hell and Comprak boards better.
In Dutch we have a saying: "Met een Dell weet je 't wel". Roughly translated its meaning is something like this:When you (have to) work on Dell hardware, you'll know it'll be frustrating because of all the non-standard parts they use. They don't even ship with a recovery cd/dvd so if the harddisk dies, you need to find a disk on the second hand market or something..what great support! bleh!
Did I mention Dells always come with underpowered power supplies?

Another oem I forgot to mention: Fujitsu Siemens.
The only bad thing about FS:Their 939-era stuff seems to die for no apparent reason.
The good is, when you find a FS motherboard, you can still find it's drivers and BIOS files (where with Dell and some others you need a computer number or something. Got a board only? You're on your own!).
That page is here:
http://uk.ts.fujitsu.com/rl/servicesupport/te … otherboards.htm
Their install media don't come with tons of extra crap, they are almost literally normal XP cd's with just a couple FS pics in a couple spots (and you don't need to activate when installing on a FS board).
You can even use nlite on those disks no problem.
FS often uses Gigabyte, Asus and other higher quality boards.
My mother bought a FS about 8? years ago? It was a Gigabyte Socket A 3200+ with an FSP-300 PSU and a Radeon 9600. I upgraded this machine and even to this day it's still one of my lan rigs, as well as my primary spare computer.

I don't know that much about PH and Comprak, except I used what I think was a s370 440LX board which had a fried PSU. I build a new rig out of it with a Celeron 400, 192MB SDRAM and PCI TNT-M64 16MB card. Except it's veeery slow boot (damage from the fried PSU? I don't know) it was a reliable system for the 2 years it was my primary rig.
The board was actually the MS-6159 and thus was also my first experience with MSI.

I learned that sometimes oem boards may be of fine quality, but it's the other components that let it down, giving the boards themselves a bad name, which they shouldn't deserve if you ask me.
As always, oem board = oem BIOS (=not many options)

Edit: Yes, FS is my favorite oem brand, but in all honesty I have to mention that it's better to avoid their laptops. My mother bought 2 of them and they were slooow. Good thing is, the FS XP cd that came with the desktop worked perfectly fine on the older laptop when we needed a reinstall.

Top board mfg for me is Asus- solid reliability and top notch quality. You don't have to buy their top end to enjoy this...all their boards are solid and reliable. Have had the best luck with them compared with any other manufacturer.

Second is DFI, also make solid and reliable boards that run like tractors. Though if you're a bit noobish, the bios options may seem unnerving. Pity they're outta business.... 🙁

Other good boards in my experience, especially if you;re into retro stuff socket 370, 478, 939: Aopen, Soyo and Asrock.

ECS and MSI are a mixed bag. Some models are excellent some a bit turkey-ish.

Intel is good but don't plan on o'cing much, which for a tweaker like me get's boring. However for a work PC or anything where you need reliability, they are tops.

Often you can disable the splash screen in the BIOS. The win 3.10-alike BIOS you described was AMI's windows BIOS. It may not be very handy, but for some reason I like those

Don't think I found a way to turn off the splash screen or at least I couldn't find it when I last looked maybe I missed that somehow.

About changing BIOS, you can actually flash a different BIOS to your board, but it comes with risks.

I've thought about this and wondering if I should try with the 440BX compaq boards I have since I have 2 of them. I was surprised when my slot 1 PIII 750Mhz just worked when I tried it in one of the boards, Server 2003 still took a long time to boot though.

awergh wrote:

Server 2003 still took a long time to boot though.

That's weird. I tried Server 2003 on a P3-800 once and thought it was snappier then XP.

Even though I don't like using mobo's from the bottom-end manufacturers...since I've gotten a Tualatin capable board made by ECS, I'm willing to give this one a chance...here goes nothing 🤣!

I can't believe nobody in here mentioned American Megatrends. I believe they no longer manufacturer motherboards, but I always found their boards to be top notch. Fast, stable, lots of options and built to widthstand a nuclear holocaust.

That's weird. I tried Server 2003 on a P3-800 once and thought it was snappier then XP.

Nah its not a straight 2003 install it was the problem of slow bootup not snappiness I did find that 2003 seemed faster then 2000 Server for some reason though. I was running Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, DFS which slowed things down abit, some people might think I'm strange for running a domain when I'm the only user but thats just what I do.

Just my opinion ( I only read the beginning of the thread ) on the new boards:

ASUS - Look pretty strong, using Fujitsu capacitance collector (that silver square chip) at 3 places on RAMPAGE class board - CPU, chipset and RAM subsystem. Then they introduced the DIGI VRM + EPU, not a bad idea. So yes, the make the most of innovations on their top boards, BUT! To my experience and other ''recappers'', era of P4, Athlon based boards were the biggest suckers on the planet, thus never ever use ASS-US with these sockets - invisible capacitor problems.

GIGABYTE - Nothing 😀....Just have to say that introducing the Ultra Durable is the last thing and there was nothing more that could interest me more - again this suxx too. No visible technological advancement.

Abit - The very best in their field, the proof is the BP6 motherboard - Intel claimed Celeron could not do SMP. Well, SKILLED technicians at Abit made this false. Not thanks to some new parts, electronics on the mobo, but because of their knowledge and way how to figure things out they deserve (from my point of view) the 1st place on the pedestal...

MSI - They caught my glimpse by developing the Core Cell, which is just a chip that controls the basic system parameters from OS. The other thing is that I like HiCaps due to the place saving and they've made a great OC dual 940 mobo - The K8N MASTER2- FAR (ms-9620).

The others? Don't care 😀