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 owned a Chaintech Slot 1 i440LX board back in the late 90s, that board ran for about 7 years with no issues. Probably the most reliable computer I ever owned. I only wished that it was an i440BX so I could upgrade to a 100MHz FSB CPU or a P3 🤣 I was stuck with a 266MHz Pentium 2 for years. Tried a Slocket adapter with a socket 370 celeron but it wouldn't POST.

I can echo your sentiments about ECS and PC CHIPS. I owned an ECS socket A board and it was terrible, upgraded to an Asus board within a year. I've got about 3 PC CHIPS 486-era boards currently in my possession and they either have no L2 cache, or they have the dreaded fake cache chips. They seem very unstable too.

I used to come across a LOT of Octek boards back in the Socket 7 Pentum days and they seemed pretty reliable. They were popular, I'm not sure whether that was because they were merely cheap or had a good reputation, but they seemed pretty solid, can't think of any issues with them.

Quite same. My favorite manufacturer is Gigabyte and Asus, mainly because their reliability are high, although with slightly higher price.

I have recently acquired an Intel motherboard, and it is quite good and reliable although the overclocking functions are removed 😀

Some other boards I had is an Jetway Socket 7 (never tried it 😁), IBM Socket 7 (quite reliable although sometimes freezes), and the most reliable (I think 😁) is an Kentech Computer Corporation 80286 along with its punched-in Am80286 processor. (I don't know the name for the slot which the processor is 'punched' down onto the slot 😁). It resides on an IBM PC AT clone which I acquired some years ago along with Seagate ST238R harddisk which died because I mistakenly put a big speaker near that thing 🙁

Great post Tetrium. My favourite boards are Epox EP-8KTA3+Pro (KT133A chipset), and Asus P2B (i440BX chipset). I've mentioned the following info before in other posts, so please ignore the rest of this post if it sounds familiar..

I like the Epox board because you can run a mobile barton XP-M 3000+ rated chip in it. If the caps aren't too rotten, it overclocks to 150 FSB with this chip, giving you a real clock speed of 2.5 GHz. It's got 1 ISA slot, so you can shove in an old sound card, and mount a wavetable daughterboard on to it, for a complete retro sound solution. Some candidates are SB clones such as Opti, ESS and Crystal.

I like the Asus P2B because it can run at 150 FSB with a Powerleap adapter, with a Tualatin chip, giving you a real clock speed of approx 1.6 GHz.

Gigabyte - if you want mb for a 2 years, its ok, when you need it use 3 years, then you have 80% chance for dead MB. About 90% s754/s939 MB we sold already died. About 70% mobos sAM2 mobos with nforce 520/560 chipset died too. We stopped selling gigabyte after we realised that am2 mb are dying even faster than s754/939.

Asus - dying much less than gigabyte, better quality, higher prices, very bad bios - all versions have about twice more bios updates, than other manufacturers. Also sometimes very picky about memory modules - often doesnt work and memtest doesnt show it, it just random crashes. Mine favourite bios error is disabled PS2 mouse output after you awake computer from sleep - seen on many mb/notebooks. Still we are using Asus on more expensive PC we sold, because theres not better manufacturer here (just must flash newest bios 😉 ).

ASRock - actual best maker for cheap PC. Very cheap, many outputs, good bios, crazy chipset combinations, but it usually works. Early models had problems with capacitors.

MSI - never liked em. Very bad errors in bioses. And incompatibility problems - seen MB that worked only with AGP graphic card from MSI. Also seen nforce 2 MB with fan speed shutdown, when it went lower than 4000rpm, pc shutdown. So that unhappy customer had to use 6000rpm very loud cooler, because no newer bios with repair wasnt available. Also they using very small active coolers on some mb (nforce3/4), which usualy die after 2/3 years and then customers fry their chipsets (never buy MB with active chipset cooling).

Jetway - very cheap, plain, basic bios, but stable. Almost all had bad capacitors after 2-3 years. Still beter than today, cause when you changed capacitors, you could use them many years. When die MB today, no change of capacitors, it just fry chipset of something else - no easy repairs. But dunno how good are recent mb, they almost stopped selling them here when Athlons 64 came.

ECS - same as jetway, but more durable

Intel - very plain bios, are dying same as other mobos, almost no ports, not cheap -> no reason to use them.

Abit - mine favourite ones. Very expensive, overclocking friendly, had capacitors problems at pentium 3 mobos, later is ok. Too bad they ended - still using mine core 2 duo 8400 at abit IP35 Pro MB clocked to 3600MHz.

Big fan of Asrock!

vlask wrote:

-snip- nforce -snip-

I never liked NForce boards. Never really understood why they were supposed to be so great. I have some vague feeling the post-XP NForces are prone to dying.

I've always preferred VIA (Socket A DDR and later) since they worked for me.

Frankly, I've read a lot negative posts about MSI and I'm aware I might've simply dodged the bullet for now. Anyhow, so far so good!

Were the Gigabytes you sold by any chance NF boards?

And I suppose that, since you're a professional PC builder, you use only quality PSU's, right?

Tell me more! 😉

vlask wrote:

ASRock - ...crazy chipset combinations

I totally agree with you there! 😉 I love Asrock for doing that. In the years to come, I'm pretty sure those boards will be very wanted by future vintage collectors ;D

Tetrium wrote:

vlask wrote:

-snip- nforce -snip-

I never liked NForce boards. Never really understood why they were supposed to be so great.

BECAUSE ITS THE WAY ITS MEANT TO BE PLAYED(tm)!!!! Tinny sound, broken networking.... the nVidia nforce is THE gamer's choice! Couple it with the powerful Geforce FX and you're ready for next generation gaming courtesy of industry standard bar-setter nVidia.

If you disagree, then DAWN WILL MURDER YOU!

NVIDIA NVIDIA NVIDIA NVIDIA THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED NVIDIA NVIDIA NVIDIA NVIDIA

I guess it all comes down with how much luck each of us had with different manufacturers. If you bought 20 mobos from brand A and none of them were faulty, you would love brand A. If another person bought just one of brand A and it came faulty, he's gonna curse that brand and talk bad about it everytime he can.

For my part, all the PCChips boards I came across over the last 20 years all were in perfect working condition. Even today that boards still works, I have 5 of those boards myself: an M912, M520, M550, M571, M598 and M741 and all are working ok. I'm not talking about performance or anything like that here, just about durability. They're also the more fun to play with because of all the hidden disabled BIOS features and the register tweaks you can do to get the performance up. Of course, if I had to buy them in the time they were popular, I would had to avoid them the best as I could, but now they're fun to play with.
In the contrast, I had always hear that Soyo boards were good, but for me, all the ones I came through were horribly bad: bad caps, broken chips, not working, etc.
Also don't like ASUS boards. Almost always you have to download a BIOS update to get something working. Happened to me with a M3N78-EM board and a 7750 Athlon. If you didn't upgrade your BIOS, the CPU temperature would reach higher than 70º temperature.

For now I had very good luck with BIOSTAR mobos, my main PC uses a Gigabyte mobo and sadly the green line out from the back stopped working, so just for that i'm not buying Gigabyte again.

As I said, I think it all comes down to how much luck you have.

Thoughts:

Gigabyte: I liked them before they were well-known. Used their GA6BXC i440BX board for my PII-450. That board was mentioned for a long time in nVidia driver release notes as having a below-spec AGP voltage regulator, but I think I had a later revision that fixed the issue (although I did perform a workaround just to be sure).

EVGA: I can't believe noone has mentioned this company yet. They're good about releasing regular BIOS updates, and they have some of the most overclocker-friendly boards on the market right now (partially because their BIOS option screens have more options than those of most other major motherboard manufacturers). They also have a really good forum community full of customers who collaborate on overclocking efforts. My current P55-based system uses an EVGA E657 motherboard, and I've got my Core i7 860 overclocked from the default 2.8Ghz to a stable 4.2Ghz.

Asus: I feel that they've always been a bit overrated. They tend to get caught up in gluing extra features to their boards without enough regard to stability. I have a system with an Asus A8N-SLI Premium (or was it Deluxe?) and its secondary SATA controller stops working whenever I have an Asus Xonar DX sound card installed.

nForce: I only cared about the nForce2 with SoundStorm audio chipsets, as they were the first to bring Dolby Digital Live to the PC. Creative then bought Sensaura in order to kill SoundStorm by making it too expensive for nVidia to continue production of the chipset.

nVidia's ION chipset is pretty nice. Other than that I've pretty much written them off as another Creative/3dfx style company that is driven by marketing hoopla rather than engineering innovation.

I believe we also need to distinguish between AMD and Intel boards...

Now this is my personal opinion but AMD boards always take a while to mature compared to Intel boards.

Back in the day, the quality of the chipset was a huge factor and IMO Intel chipsets are the most mature and give you the least issues.

True, I first used Gigabyte with Intel but later with AMD. I've only used Asus with AMD and EVGA with Intel.

VIA+AMD was a terrible, terrible combo in the K6-2 days, and I've always judged VIA harshly since.

VIA was bad. My last (bad) experience with VIA was a cheap ECS Socket 754 AMD board. I got this PCI TV tuner card and when watching TV the system would lock up randomly.

Tried all sort of things, no luck. Got a asrock 754 board with an Nvidia chipset and all was good...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Back in the day, the quality of the chipset was a huge factor and IMO Intel chipsets are the most mature and give you the least issues.

...as long as it's not the i820 😜
Intel does make nice chipsets, but I rate them lower then they could've been because Intel loves castrating it's own products (430TX with only 64meg cacheable ram, Tualatin needing a new chipset even though Tualatin;s basically just a die schrink, not to mention the RIMM debacle).

Edit: I think VIA made up when they started releasing their Athlon XP DDR chipsets. Atleast their northbridges didn't need active cooling, like NF does.
I'm using a Socket 754 and 939, both with VIA chipsets and the only gripe I have is their SATA 1 controllers are incompatible with SATA 2 drives. other then that they work just fine.
I think your issue is more to do with ECS and less with VIA.

Yea could have been an ECS issue who knows 🤣

Before that I had an Asrock Socket A board which also used a VIA chipset (not sure which one) and I loved that board. Had one of these Semprons (I believe it was the top model 3000+) and a Radeon 9700. It was quite the value gaming machine (at a time when the Geforce 6800 was already out).

After that I had a ton of Asrock boards and they all where fantastic. Currently using an Asus and a Phenom 555 unlocked to a quad and it's fine as well.

ASUS is still my number one mobo brand, for the most part you can't go wrong here 😉

Had plenty of them all the way from socket 3's on up, had many Workstation boards from them, my first was a Dual Slot 1 with a pair of P2/450's.

Then I would say pretty much a tie between Aopen and Gigabyte.

The main reason for Aopen is like a post above, I've never had any issues with their mobo's, pretty much the same with Gigabyte as well, and of course both of these vendors made other products too.

I've also tried a smattering of Epox, FIC and Biostar boards, they too have run fine, in fact one of my current boards is a Biostar AM2+ board 😉

The one brand I always had failures with even though they setup and installed just fine was MSI, could have been luck of the draw but one in particular was a Socket A board for use with a Barton core CPU, failed within a month of use in three consecutive months, I just gave up as I was out....

Now the generic boards out there I'm sure I've seen here and there, basically everything made by the Uber Generic Vendor named ECS or Elite Group who made all kinds of OEM boards with so many names on them, their most popular being PCchips of course...

Have not really had any issues with these boards either, my favorite named generic was the TOMATO motherboards.

Another one that I remember selling a boatload of were the Amptron combo boards with the Cyrix 6x86 series CPU's, made a killing selling pre-tested and pre-configured boards this way, even sold a few COAST sticks along the way too 😁

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea could have been an ECS issue who knows 🤣

Before that I had an Asrock Socket A board which also used a VIA chipset (not sure which one) and I loved that board. Had one of these Semprons (I believe it was the top model 3000+) and a Radeon 9700. It was quite the value gaming machine (at a time when the Geforce 6800 was already out).

After that I had a ton of Asrock boards and they all where fantastic. Currently using an Asus and a Phenom 555 unlocked to a quad and it's fine as well.

Thats good to hear. I'll keep Asrock in mind 😉
I never had Asrock myself but a friend of mine had 2, both developing bad caps. I think some of their mobo's are vastly interesting.
I bet if they were around during the later 90's, they'd make an ATX Socket 3 board!! *drools 😁 *

They started off with these weird hybrid boards, eg PCIe and AGP or DDR and DDR2 and sometimes even a CPU upgrade slot.

But now they do boards like everyone else just a little bit cheaper.

The really cheap boards are now other brands like ECS or JW.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

They started off with these weird hybrid boards, eg PCIe and AGP or DDR and DDR2 and sometimes even a CPU upgrade slot.

But now they do boards like everyone else just a little bit cheaper.

The really cheap boards are now other brands like ECS or JW.

Is there any list of all these weird hybrid boards? I tried looking for one but it's hard if you have very little to go on

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