In my experience, excluding PCCHIPS, motherboards are pretty robust, and even PCCHIPS can be very long lived if you get a OK one. I have found graphics cards the most fragile part of my PC's, lost more of those than even hard drives, surprised really as they are mechanical and work very hard. But I have lost more Video cards than any other component in a PC.

In my experience you just need to choose the right motherboards. As with other thngs you get what you pay for more often than not.

During 2009 I built a lot of systems for family and friends and friends friends using the Asus P6T line of Socket-1366 motherboards. They are all still working although the two systems I have traded back in when people wanted newer systems were totally clogged with crud making the i7 CPUs throttle because they were reaching 100C during load.

At work recently I "recycled" a ton of old Core 2 duo machines. I tested them all, I think out of 100 machines, maybe 1 or 2 were faulty. Motherboards were Intel boards.

It seems like modern motherboards should be more reliable. They almost always use all solid caps now, and many modern boards are now conformal coated.

When we hear stories of boards being RMA'd we don't usually know the whole story behind it. It's possible that there was an ESD event that contributed, or a slipped screwdriver, some short from a loose screw, overly aggressive overclocking, etc.

Don't rule out some other causes like cheap PSUs, poor air flow and/or faulty fans.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Motherboards were Intel boards.

Intel motherboards is what I have been stacking up on for my retro rigs and it's also what I plan on buying for my modern rig.

Zup wrote:

Don't rule out some other causes like cheap PSUs, poor air flow and/or faulty fans.

I had a bad experience with my Gigabyte UD3 when PCIEX16 slots just died. It lasted about 2 years. Then I found out that some other folks had the exact same issue with this specific motherboard. And I went with Gigabyte for a reason...

I have an ASUS Sabretooth board complete with military-grade components and heatsinks covering virtually the entire board. It's DESIGED to be overclocked, though I clock it normal. So far, it's lasted me since mid-2013 without any issues. :)

Now let's scroll back to 2001 when I helped Mom get a new computer built which she ultimately gave to me when I moved out on my own in 2002. We had a fairly typical A-Bit motherboard put in, I forget the specific one. In 2005 I started getting weird date anomalies on the hard drive, where files would, at random, come up with date codes which made no sense. I thought maybe the hard drive was going and thus put in a second one to act strictly as a backup drive... but... only date codes were being affected and it started affecting the brand new drive too. The problem got worse and worse, STILL only affecting date codes, but now I was also having random system lock-ups. Eventually, some way into 2006, I had a lock-up while working on my Retro Wizard project (which never saw a release), I reset the system... and... the POST screen just sat there doing nothing. No amount of reboots fixed it. D:

A friend helped me take the motherboard out and lo and behold, the problem was a bad cap right next to the CPU. :P

Never fixed it as back then I didn't know enough about electronics to know that fixing such things were possible. I had taken the CPU and BIOS chips out without any concern for ESD or anything thinking the whole thing was never going to be possible to revive so... Yeah, never going to be revived NOW. :P

From personal experience, I've only had one motherboard failure compared with about a half-dozen video card failures.

From 2003 to this day, my main PC has lost 3 videocards (x1800GTO and 2 HD5670) and 1 onboard sound chip on ASUS P5B. My Willamette Celly from 2003 is still working fine at my neighbour's place. Maybe I'm lucky.

It's not that bad anymore as it was like 7-8 years ago with alot of brands but still the occasional failure line comes and goes.
Asrock used to be totally crap years ago and now produces over the whole line good boards, the Z77 bios issue is the only recent mass issue that goes around.
Asus had a few bad revisions in their line up the last 5 years, most of them in the AMD section.
Only brand I saw alot of bad boards lately was Supermicro where the boards or aren't stable or simply stop without any visual sign of defect. 😠

I build alot systems and in general I rely on Asus or Gigabyte boards. In the last 5 years I had only 2 boards that went defect out about 190 boards in total so it really seems to be a non issue anymore. 😀 Every system I build is designed to last 5 years minimum so they all do great. From the older boards a few died to external causes like lightning surges, spilled liquid over them or inserting USB devices the wrong way and forcing them in. 😵

10-15 years ago there where alot more boards that had issues long before 5 years passed, and not only due to bad capacitors..

I only buy Asus for myself, and no motherboard problems have ever risen...

I'm using Asus since the days of original Pentium, and almost never had a motherboard failure.

My current one is a P5Q premium and its running 5-6 hours average at least every single day since 2009, and still has no problems.

Just had another VGA card die, a Nvidia TNT 16mb, stored indoors in anti-static bag. VRAM fail. totally corrupted right from BIOS. Off to the e-waste bin........

1 thing too keep in mind is how much in on board these days. Video, Audio, Network in fact for a standard office PC really its only the drives, RAM, CPU, PSU.
So in the old days faulty sound/network wouldn't require you to swap the motherboard like now

chinny22 wrote:

So in the old days faulty sound/network wouldn't require you to swap the motherboard like now

Err... you can just go into the BIOS, disable the on-board device, and install a cheap add-in card to replace the functionality of the malfunctioning component. Heck, many features can even be done with USB devices nowadays. :B

Using an old EVGA socket 939 AMD board right now from around 2004. Every component in this custom machine has lasted great since then (save for the old Nvidia gfx card, which was replaced not long ago). But I'm happily running Debian on it right now on 1.5GB of RAM and a 2.4Ghz single core CPU 😀

Honestly I have had great luck with modern motherboards. None of the machines I have built/or replaced with new motherboards have had any RMA issues. Mine uses onboard Realtek LAN and audio for everything for the past 4 years and counting with no issues from Windows 7 to 10. Honestly if anything It seems like as long as you shop smart and get a good working board from the get-go, lifespan is a non-issue.

BSA Starfire wrote:

I have found graphics cards the most fragile part of my PC's,

my personal experience that would be the integrated graphics (Intel), i have 2 of such boards RMA.
The technicians said in both case the integrated graphics chip went kaput and its affected the motherbords.
One of technicians recommend me to use the dedicated graphics card instead,
so i go for cheap GT 620 graphic card, since then the new mainboard and the GT 620 are still kicking and its haven't failed on me, and its already last longer than the previous 2 motherboards.

Never had a complete motherboard failure in my entire 29 years of computing. One time a Soyo slot 1 motherboard suffered an AGP slot failure but that's about it. On the other hand, I buried a Power Color Radeon 9700 and four hard drives during the same timespan 😀