Epox, because I have one in my set.

Abit - KT7A / KT7A-RAID.

Modded BIOS available that works with Barton.. and it supports the socket pin / wire mod to enable the higher multipliers so you can use the Barton mobile CPUs in it.
You can get a good 2.3-2.4Ghz out of this board.

I just have a soft spot for it as well since I also had one back in the day.

Never was a huge fan of Epox and definitely not a fan of DFI.

QDI V4P895GRN/SMT V1.1.

It's probably the most versatile VLB motherboard I have, pretty stable even with an AMD 5x86 at 40MHz FSB. It's based on an Opti895 chipset, which is not the fastest, but is pretty rock-solid.

ABIT BH6

I also like the ABIT FU3 (386 mobo with 40MHz support and lots of bios options to improve the speed)

Nemo1985 wrote:

All brand that don't exist anymore

QDI is still around, they go under the name "Lenovo" these days... 😎

cyclone3d wrote:

Abit - KT7A / KT7A-RAID. […]
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Abit - KT7A / KT7A-RAID.

Modded BIOS available that works with Barton.. and it supports the socket pin / wire mod to enable the higher multipliers so you can use the Barton mobile CPUs in it.
You can get a good 2.3-2.4Ghz out of this board.

I just have a soft spot for it as well since I also had one back in the day.

Never was a huge fan of Epox and definitely not a fan of DFI.

I have the Abit KT7A i bought with bulged caps i had to repair, installed the Modded BIOS, bought a Mobile Athlon XP (not barton), and after all the time and money i discovered the chipset does not support changing multipliers on the fly using Setmul or any other tool, it just freezes. That alone renders getting the Mobile Athlon pointless. I tried a couple different KT133/A based motherboards since then, none of them can change multipliers on the fly. Shame on VIA, it seems they started to support the feature from KT266.

Nice board (with bad quality chinese caps), but I had to take a very different approach for that project where one would prefer the ability to lower clocks and take advantage of the isa slot for DOS compatibility.

QDI made a very high quality boards, i have a bunch of them and they are very well made, but the weak spot of these boards was always the same; Lower bios customization than Asus or Abit, and the fact that they prefer to release another board with the same chipset to support newer processors than just launch a bios update for the previous ones, so they ended up, for example, having 3 or 4 almost identical Slot1 Intel 440BX based motherboards. They also liked to solder the bios chip directly to the motherboards, instead of using a socket, so trying to crossflash them was much more troublesome if the board was not posting after the experiment.

Epox was almost non-existant in my country, and DFI, well i am not a fan of them either. For me Abit was the best of this dissapeared brands, they use bad quality capacitors in their boards, i rarely see one nowadays with all caps fully working (if not bulged or exploded), but in bios customization and flexibility, and after a full recap, they were the best.

I would always buy an Asus board anyway over Abit, great boards with great capacitors, and great bioses, but that brand still exists and is not to be considered in this thread 😊

That's a lot of brands and a long period of time...

Also, 'best' can mean many things. Requiring good caps 1999-2004 would disqualify the lot of them - no doubt contributing to their commercial demise - even if QDI survived as Lenovo and kept using bad caps for years after 🙁

I'd be tempted to say the Abit BP6 would be the high point, a unique board with capabilities offered by none other that enabled a lot of people to do something (SMP) at a price point that would not have been possible otherwise. All those vendors had other good, even great boards, but nothing else was truly unique.

I have an Abit VH6T and I'm running a 1.4GHz Tualatin in it.

It's extremely stable - I never have any problems with any hardware. All of my ATI and Nvidia graphics cards work, my Voodoo 2 and Banshee just run fine and I have even thrown an old OpTi ISA sound card in there. DOS gaming on 1.4GHz is so much fun.

It also has extensive overclocking options in the BIOS, so if I want to run my system a 1.53GHz, or 700MHz or adjust the PCI bus speed to some specific setting I can just do it by rebooting and changing the settings.

The only problem with this board are the horrible capacitors - they need to be replaced. If you buy a VH6T that has never been recapped they'll be very likely swollen or leaking.

AOpen had many interesting boards. Quite a lot of them are considered top tier.

Thank you for the answers. That made me know models that I didn't know or remember.
It seems DFI it's not really liked around here. Well, it was around at least since socket 7 until lga 775. Talking with the series of nforce4, I remember it had so many options for memory timings that most of people became crazy to find the best combination.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

AOpen had many interesting boards. Quite a lot of them are considered top tier.

Aopen is still around or am I wrong? Anyway feel free to suggst some models 😀
I have a AOpen AX59Pro bought non working (doesn't turn on) on ebay, I came out that it had the clear cmos jumper in wrong position, that's why it wasn't turning on. It is in pristine condition and with his original box.
That being said it's nothing special imho.

dionb wrote:

That's a lot of brands and a long period of time...

Also, 'best' can mean many things. Requiring good caps 1999-2004 would disqualify the lot of them - no doubt contributing to their commercial demise - even if QDI survived as Lenovo and kept using bad caps for years after 🙁

[...] All those vendors had other good, even great boards, but nothing else was truly unique.

You are right, I should clarify what I mean with best. I believe there is usually an undisputed best mb for any given mb. Or something that was unique.
That's why I kindly disagree with you. The QDI titanium 1b+ was the first jumperless motherboard. An important revolution imho (I hate to mess with jumpers). Epox MVP3G5 was imho the best mvp3 mb, nothing special but it was able to use fsb higher than 100mhz, it was "stable" and had good performance. DFI was for a period of time the most used mb for "serious overclocking".

AOpen was Acer's consumer brand. Not seen any AOpen-branded stuff recently, but Acer certainly exists. AOpen was wonderfully quirky, I'd nominate two of their boards:

AX4B-533 Tube - an otherwise unremarkable i845E design spiced up with an onboard tube amplifier. Of course, it was still amplifying AC'97 audio and suffered from all the noise of other similar onboard solutions. But still, vacuum tube mofos :+

Or take this:

AX3S-Pro Sweet Kiss - a regular i815E So370 FC-PGA board. But pink. VERY pink 😜

A friend of mine caused something of a stir in casemodding circles with this case construction based on it:

That vacuum tube amplifier looks ridiculous 🤣

That vacuum tube amplifier looks ridiculous

Even more ridiculous is the fact that it's used on a cheap Realtek codec.

It seems DFI it's not really liked around here.

DFI had a few interesting boards in the 90s, but their real fame was started with the LanParty series based on Nforce 2 and i875P chipsets.

Nemo1985 wrote:

Thank you for the answers. That made me know models that I didn't know or remember.
It seems DFI it's not really liked around here. Well, it was around at least since socket 7 until lga 775. Talking with the series of nforce4, I remember it had so many options for memory timings that most of people became crazy to find the best combination.

Sure, Nforce chipsets were top performers for enthusiasts, it is just that they were made for the less wanted generations of computers today or still not retro enough. The first Nforce was for the Athlon if i remember right, and it was not mature enough till the Nforce 2 for the Athlon XP, It was the top performer chipset for that generation, and the most wanted one for overclockers and tweakers of that era, i still own my Asus A7N8X-E i used in that era in its box with everything, but it lacks some functions very useful for today retrogamers, like support for mobile Athlons, ISA bus, and Windows 98 support. It was a chipset geared towards Windows XP, but windows XP was mainstream for so long that there are much better platforms to make a build dedicated for Windows XP 😉

TLDR: You cannot build a proper DOS/Win98 nor a top performance Win XP build using any Nforce chipset.

Nforce 2 has Windows 98 support, but not DOS friendly.

A personal favorite of mine was the Epox 8K3A+. I was able to push mine up to 215 MHz FSB, but I finally settled on 209 because the out of spec PCI bus began slowing down my hard drive speed at anything past 209. I only moved on to an Nforce 2 because the 8K3A+ developed bulging capacitors.

QDI and DFI are, to me, relevant up through the Pentium era. By the time ATX started taking over, I was more into Asus. The computer store I worked at for a while did have a DFI board or two in the late P3 / early P4 times, but it struck me as a bit of a budget board.

Some of the P4 / Athlon Asus boards were a little... eh, quirky. Got lots of returns, especially on the Socket A boards. So, I moved on to Epox about then. I loved the (three or four, I think) Epox boards I had -- fast, relatively inexpensive, lots of features, nice design.. so I stuck with them up until they went AWOL.

Then I moved on to Abit. Definitely an enthusiast's brand. Lots of OC options, RAID, SATA, all the fancy stuff. They seemed to get a little shaky after the Core 2 era, and TBH, I was getting sick of the influx of cheap garbage boards with "attitude" style over substance, so I started buying Intel OEM boards until they threw in the towel. Supermicro when I was building stuff for work or more of an "appliance" role. I really don't know what I would pick for a home PC now. It's been a few years.

As for "which board," that seems like a no-win scenario to me. I mean... what are you looking for? I've been into mini-ITX for a while, for rack-mount boxes or small desktop form factors. If you have to have 10% faster benchmarks, or want a light-show in your case, then that's a different ball of wax. Either way, do you have a chipset preference? What socket? How many slots do you need? What about onboard I/O? Apparently somebody thought having a tube in their computer was a good idea, so there's that...

I've definitely got my favorites. Asus P2B, TUSL-2; Abit IC7-G (Serillel!); don't remember the Epox P4 board I really liked.. oh, EP-4G4M+ I think. Nothing particularly special about it, it just had the features I wanted at the time.

SirNickity wrote:

I really don't know what I would pick for a home PC now. It's been a few years.

I've stopped getting mainboards, CPU's, cases and all of these things separately. Instead, I've settled with buying a small form factor (SFF) office PC every few years. At the moment, my main machine is a Fujitsu Esprimo E series.

You can get an older SFF PC with an i7 for around 200$, just need to throw in a low profile GPU and this thing is done.
SFF PC's generally have a good case quality and there's a lot of bang for the buck you can get with them.

Sure, you can't put the latest and greatest (like a RTX2070) in there, but it saves the hassle of sourcing all of the individual parts.

I always have been an Abit guy! I kept all the boards I purchased and every single one I could lay my hands on! I enjoyed the jumper free settings, the extensive configuration options and all the extra that Abit engineers packed into those boards! I now have a respectable collection of Abit motherboards but I am still hunting for the remaining ones in order to have a complete collection. The management was crap but the Oskar Wu and all the little guys created some memorable boards: BH6, NF7, ST6, AW9D-MAX, IP35 Pro and so on.