Ed Medlin said:
Out of those, I have had good luck with Asus.
I'm no expert and just started building during the last 6 months (with the
help of some on this list) but I've been noticing a few things about
motherboards and about people's opinions about them. The only real thing
that seems consistent is that some companies are oriented toward putting out
the best-fastest thing possible in the shortest period of time in order to
gain market advantage. When they do, they risk putting it out before all of
the bugs and compatibility issues are worked out. Often, those bugs are
related to the bios, so if they exist they can be fixed after the build is
completed. Someone pointed out to me a week or two ago, however, that
sometimes those issues are related to the hardware. In that event you have a
greater problem because the build can't be fixed without pulling the entire
board and replacing with a revised version.
If you get the newest greatest board, you risk these problems to a larger
extent. I bought a new gigabyte board about 5 months ago and have had
problems with some crashes and not having sata drives being detected until I
unplug and replug them. I'm now hearing (after my purchase) that people
believe this to be common for gigabyte - releasing the product quickly and
fixing it with bios revisions. They are up to 6 revisions on my board (7
total including the original) in about a year after production. I just
flashed the latest version about 2 days ago (said to solve some problems
related to sata drives), and so far none of these problems have occurred.
I'm now realizing that I really don't need the latest greatest thing for
what I do and I don't really need the aggravation of flashing bioses (and
the stress associated of knowing that something can go wrong in the process
and make the entire machine into a large paperweight), and unplugging and
re-plugging sata drives to get the bios to recognize them properly.
The next machine (that I think I will order on Monday), will have a Tyan
motherboard even though it doesn't have the most of the fastest PCIe slots,
and doesn't support the fastest ram available.
Other than issues related to pre-mature releases and whether one wants to
take risks with the newest hardware, however, I'm not really seeing any
consistency about opinions on motherboards on this list or elsewhere. It
seems that everyone has had bad experiences with different boards pretty
much equally and everyone will give you a different opinion about which is
best and which one gave them problems in the past. I've heard just as many
people say that they have had no problem with Asus as I've heard people say
that they have. ...same with most other boards - other than what I already
mentioned - if you get the newest thing (apparently more likely with
Gigabyte), you are more likely to have bug and compatibility problems that
may take some time to fix with an updated bios.
For the most part, it seems that you should just find a board with the
features that you need, and if you don't really need something, you might
want to stick with something that has been around a bit longer.
Jeff