dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-26, 07:52:

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. 😁

Jetway, which is in the signature.
Hypertransport (1.25V) is powered not from the 3.3V bus (like all normal people do), but from 1.5V AGP.
Through a transistor with Rds= 0.1 Ohm.

Any decent AGP video card hung the system at random time.
Well, nothing, for 5 years of ownership, I still figured it out and changed the transistor 😀
If it was not a hobby, but the main PC at 2004 - I would have smashed it.

The first PC I built and owned, back in the early '90s. It was a 486DLC system with a motherboard with an OPTi chipset that had a buggy DMA controller. It would cause some games to lock up the system while playing back digital audio through a sound card. It kept occurring, even after I had upgraded the sound card to a Gravis Ultrasound. Some games were more prone to such freezes than others, but it really sucked.

Even the floppy edition of OS/2 2.0 would freeze during installation on that system. Which makes sense, since the floppy controller uses ISA DMA as well.

So my first motherboard was by far the most shitty motherboard I've ever owned.

Here's a few motherboards I didn't particularly like. I got them as brand new. Can't really tell which I rate as the most shitty, but back then I was really angry about the FIC not able to work with some better (more performant) AGP cards.

Chaintech 5TLM (Soc. 7) - unstable, randomly crashing after several hours no matter what components, bios settings, drivers were used
FIC FS15T (Soc. 370, i815) - slower than other i815s, annoyingly incompatible AGP, almost nothing to configure regarding CPU/memory/bus in bios
ASUS P5K (Soc. 775, P35) - bad board design, falsely advertised as RAID capable (this "RAID" can be done using only 2 SATA ports which are provided by 3rd party chip, and one of these ports is external (!)), the whole board felt like some prototype

mkarcher wrote on 2023-04-25, 21:31:

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.

Did you realise you quoted a 10 year old post? 😁

I must thank you actually, it was quite interesting reading something I'd written so long ago; I'd f0rgotten nearly half the boards mentioned in that post. Not the K7S5A though; I still award that one the dishonour of worst motherboard I ever owned.

My worst is actually a more recent one: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5. Ran like normal for a while, then switched it off, the next day the board was dead. No thunderstorm had passed, it went into some kind of infinite boot loop.
After a LOT of troubleshooting in multiple multihour sessions, it managed to spring to life just once, but the next reset it went back to dead again. It died for no apparent reason and it apparently was happening to other users of this board as well. Also (at the time at least) Gigabyte seemed to ignore this issue completely and my enthousiasm for gigabyte died alongside this board. I love their older boards, but this board was pure dogshit. And not because it was unstable, because it was not (I had no issues whatsoever with it before it died), but because it just...died. Poof, gone. Not exactly what one would call reliable. Just make a board that doesn't just die please, thank you!

Older (retro) boards another board comes to mind right away, the Abit KV7-V. KT-600 and the board I got (was second hand so it might have been the previous owner and not the board itself) never made it into a stable windows environment. Would often lock up even during the counting of the memory. BIOS upgrade didn't solve it (it actually did manage to flash it successfully without locking up during the flash process). At some point I gave up on that board and ended up just getting myself a brand new s754 and s939 board.

FIC 486 motherboards in general, those with VLB in particular.

Let's not even talk about their "VIP" boards...

Of those that I currently own, the PCChips M507 and M520 are tied for worst place. Both have fake memory cache, but I really feel for whoever had to use the computer that the M520 was in as it came equipped with 128 megabytes of memory, no cache, and a K5 PR133; the M507 did have cache in the cache slot.

I guess you never know - the Chaintech 5AGM2 was mentioned as a worst by another poster , but the one I had worked fine. The only gripe I had was that the USB header on the board wasn't standard; the pins were tiny and were spaced too closely to use a standard USB dongle. I had to rob a couple of five pin connectors out of a dead CDROM, trim the plastic so they would fit the pin header then solder them to a standard USB dongle.

I think the worst motherboards i've previously owned that spring to mind were the ECS Nforce3-A939 and possibly the K7S5A. I hated these boards because i used to frequently get graphics corruption and artifacting just at the desktop, sometimes blue screens, and sometimes it wouldn't reach the OS. Ugh!!
Although thinking about it now, and reading other peoples comments about the K7S5A, i do wonder if all the crashes and instability issues i remember having with these boards were to do with the memory i was using at the time.
Thankfully, I've learned a great deal more about hardware since then, and have nowhere near as many crashes and issues as i used to.

I think i got rid of those 2 motherboards a few years ago, as i can't find them now, I could only find a few of the boards i'd kept: An ECS K7VZA w/ Duron 750 CPU and a Gigabyte GA-K8N w/ Athlon 64 2800 CPU.

Without doubt ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2. Sure, the build I attempted with it probably didn't make anything easier, but no other mobo has even been close to giving me as many headaches as this piece of junk.

Got no personal experience of those PCChips boards though. Guess I should be consider myself lucky for that.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-04-26, 14:28:

Of those that I currently own, the PCChips M507 and M520 are tied for worst place.

I recently replaced the CPU socket on a M520 and the PCB immediately made 5 or 6 large bubbles when I applied heat. Vias and traces were torn apart due to the "growing" PCB.
Never experienced such a poor PCB quality.

Abit NF7-S2G. I still has this board pretty much unused in box.

Back in the day, I fiddled a lot with Socket A platform. Bought cheap Athlons, tested several motherboards, had fast memory, watercooling and tweaked the hell out of the systems just for fun. Athlons were so much fun, because you could buy low end T-bred Bs and Bartons extremely cheap and overclock the hell out of them. I had a nice EPoX board before that turd and during some of my tests I somehow managed to break the socket. So, I needed a replacement and went to the computer shop relatively near my home. However, they had very limited selection available on the shelf, mostly just generic boards not aimed at the enthusiasts, so there was clearly a problem. Because I didin't have a functioning computer otherwise, I decided to pick this turd because hey, it is NF7-series after all, so how bad it could be?

It was horrible. It had no CPU multiplier controls and CPU support was abysmal (of course this turd pretty much never got any BIOS updates either, not to mention modded BIOSes). You couldn't even get most fast Athlons running at their nominal speed, because it didin't detect the processor correctly and used too small multiplier. You couldn't set CAS2 for memory. Every tweak it had in BIOS, which was not many, usually caused the system becoming horribly unstable.

It was probably after half an hour with that thing when I realised that I had made a huge mistake. I decided to keep the board so I had at least somewhat functioning computer for internet stuff for a time being and ordered a proper enthusiast board. If I remember correctly, it was another turd from Abit, AN7 which was just released at that point. Or I had AN7 before the EPoX, but the point still remains, that it was horrible too. It had all the bells and whistles, but it was disastrously unstable. I just couldn't get it stable with 2 or more RAM sticks even stock and I got it replaced for NF7-S v2.0 after few days of frustration (or EPoX board, if my memory fails me of the order of things)

But NF7-S2G still lingers with me. I couldn't bear to sell it to anyone so I just left it in my bin with a box and accessories as a reminder. Just few weeks ago I browsed the contents of the box. It still had the Tbred-b 1700+ in the socket. Nice processor, overclocked like a beast with water. I think I need to remove it from the board, it doesn't deserve to be tortured with that board.

I guess the MS-6163 got booted off my worst list.

By whom you'd ask? Well...none other than Jetway J-7BXAN. That thing can't even do proper ACPI on 2000.

B450 Tomahawk Max. Bought open box, didn't use it until past the 30 day warranty period. Dead onboard audio, unopened MSI box upon unpacking, including accessories and manual. 3 weeks later random 8ghz core boosts with a 2600 and newest bios, dead upon start up. Everything else survived. Mobo just nuked itself.

Gigabyte MA770T. There were some gremlins inside, it would work bare bones but hang at POST as soon as you start adding cards.

Gigabyte M61PME. USB controller would randomly fail.

MSI 845EV. Picky about RAM and expansion cards, bad caps.

Gigabyte 8S648FX. Random acting weird and screen corruption with some AGP cards.

Do laptops count? Every laptop I've had that was made by Quanta except for my Gateway Solo 2500 was unstable. It's strange because Quanta is such a large server manufacturer, and that Gateway shows that someone once knew what they were doing.

I don't know if I had a truly bad desktop motherboard that wasn't defective. I guess my modern Gigabyte H370 HD3 is in the running for the garbage quality PCIe slots (the physical connectors) and BIOS bugs, but it's stable once I was able to work around that stuff. It has been on 24/7 since 2018 except for power outages (until I bought a UPS) and cleaning.

The other contender would be the Compaq Desert Storm just because there's no option to disable the SiS integrated video. It's slow just because of RAM bandwidth being split between the CPU and video. It has a good amount of CPU jumper settings, and it's as stable as you can hope for from a low-end late-1990s motherboard (maybe a crash every few months, but you had to go to Intel or Asus for true stability back then). I've had two of these. The first was unstable before completely dying, but I later discovered that the CPU was dead. I never tested it with a different CPU. At one point, the replacement would fail to boot when the room was cold, but that fixed itself.

digger wrote on 2023-04-26, 09:01:

The first PC I built and owned, back in the early '90s. It was a 486DLC system with a motherboard with an OPTi chipset that had a buggy DMA controller. It would cause some games to lock up the system while playing back digital audio through a sound card. It kept occurring, even after I had upgraded the sound card to a Gravis Ultrasound. Some games were more prone to such freezes than others, but it really sucked.

Even the floppy edition of OS/2 2.0 would freeze during installation on that system. Which makes sense, since the floppy controller uses ISA DMA as well.

So my first motherboard was by far the most shitty motherboard I've ever owned.

Very interesting you've mentioned this, because I had the same issue with a Socket 3 VLB+PCI board using an OPTi chipset; VLB video card + any sound card, it would crash whenever SFX was played. I resorted to using a PCI video card, though I desperatedly wanted to use the VLB in this build.
EDIT- actually I remembered it wrong- it wouldn't crash but would corrupt the video palette. Palette inverted when using a VLB video card and Sound Blaster and compatible cardsthe thread I created about it

Worst for me were the "dual socket" slot1 + soc 370 boards (pcchips, etc). They never worked proper. Also next is any motherboard that has both AT and ATX psu connectors....always had issues with most of them.
Probably just my bad luck but have avoided both types in last decade.....

DonutKing wrote on 2023-04-26, 14:00:

mkarcher wrote on 2023-04-25, 21:31:

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.

Did you realise you quoted a 10 year old post? 😁

I must thank you actually, it was quite interesting reading something I'd written so long ago; I'd f0rgotten nearly half the boards mentioned in that post. Not the K7S5A though; I still award that one the dishonour of worst motherboard I ever owned.

Hi DonutKing, apologies if I'm breaking any rules here as I'm new to this forum and this is off topic but it won't let me PM you yet. About 10 years ago you posted in the thread about 'what games I've bought' with a picture of a 386 of yours. It is the exact case I had as a kid and am trying to find any details about it so I can track one down. It has a key lock and a display with a lit 40 on it. IF you still have it please could you message me with any brand name or numbers or any details you have on it? Would really appreciate it!

Eagle Power586 NEC Power TX based on chineese counterfeit chipset.

https://theretroweb.com/expansion-chips/645