Best or worst MoBo's ever

[Knavish]

The Abits were horrible. BH6. BP6. I spent many a'flamefest telling the overclocker fan boys to stop recommending them merely because they overclocked a bit better than the other boards.

Best boards must've been like the Asus P2B-D. i440BX, dual CPU's. Very nice board, had one in service for 11 years, 24x7.

Yeah the 440BX chipset was the best ever...I had a dual PII-400 CPU system (Supermicro), and you can't forget the Celeron 300A overclocked to 450Mhz!

 

[ElFenix]

worst: asus a8r-mvp
it was so bad they dumped it for an improved model just a few months later and didn't fix several bios issues. mine died during a cmos reset, i sent it to asus, and it was still dead after they sent it back.


best i've had was the asus a7n8x

 

[Blain]

I'm just curious to see what your guys/girls favorite and most hated companies and specific motherboards are.

My favorite motherboard is the one i'm using now an Asus M4a88TD-V EVO, I remember the worst I had was some weird mobo that we picked up at a swap meet..... stupid thing blew up XD

You didn't even answer your own question.
"some weird mobo" isn't a specific motherboard at all.

My best MB was "the one that OC'd the best and remained stable".
My worst MB is "the one that failed".

 

[Puppies04]

I'm just curious to see what your guys/girls favorite and most hated companies and specific motherboards are.

My favorite motherboard is the one i'm using now an Asus M4a88TD-V EVO, I remember the worst I had was some weird mobo that we picked up at a swap meet..... stupid thing blew up XD

At which point did this not belong in the motherboard forum? Just curious.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have fond memories of a BX6-2 mobo that I once had. Fried it (shorted the CPU VRMs) with a failed Tualatin Slotket mod. Too bad.

My fav. mobo since then, would have to be my Gigabyte P35-DS3R v1.0 boards. I have two of them, and they just keep ticking. Not so great for overclocking beyond 400FSB, but they are very stable.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Agreed. The BH6 was the board I grew up on. It supported my Pentium III 450@512 and Celeron 533A@896.

I agree with some of the other posters that Abit has been a bit quirky compared to some of the other brands, however, the Bh6 was an awesome and great mobo.

I owned 2 BH6 boards over the years.

One of them ran my celeron 300a @ 464 for several years until I upgraded it to a celeron 533a @ 896. I gave that PC to my brother after I picked up a thunderbird with ghz cpu (don't really recall the mobos I had during the Slot A and Socket A days)

That one ran for quite a few years and never had an issue until one day it decided to get stuck doing Bios Checksum Errors. By that time I had a barton 2500 box and an athlon xp1800+ box and my brother was using my old thunderbird... so it wasn't really much of a loss.

The second BH6 was one I bought used, and ran with a slot 1 p3 that I got for free .. OC'd it a bit IIRC, and eventually gave that to my grandmother. She kept it for about 4 or 5 years until eventually my uncle gave her a better machine.

 

[mfenn]

Interesting use of first post...

Tho did bring up a bit of nostaligia, I probably had more fun on my EPoX 8KHA+ than any other board I've owned.

Oh man, EPoX were so great back in the day. Kind of like ASRock is today, but even better on the price/performance curve. I still have my old 9NDA3J kicking around somewhere.

 

[mfenn]

Agreed. It's almost like Abit engineered instability at stock just to make sure it would overclock better. Once companies like Gigabyte and Asus started to really throw money at the overclocking crowd there was no reason to put up with "quirkyness" of the Abit setup. That said the BH6 was pretty stable for me.

I agree. Freaking DFI was the same way.

 

[mfenn]

That one ran for quite a few years and never had an issue until one day it decided to get stuck doing Bios Checksum Errors. By that time I had a barton 2500 box and an athlon xp1800+ box and my brother was using my old thunderbird... so it wasn't really much of a loss.

Sounds like the CMOS battery going bad to me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sounds like the CMOS battery going bad to me.

I suppose that depends on whether or not it was showing "CMOS Checksum error" or "BIOS Checksum error".

If the BIOS checksum failed, then the BIOS got corrupted (bitrot, due to age, flash cells lose data over long periods of time), and needed to be re-flashed.

If it was just a CMOS checksum failed, then yes, it needed a new CMOS battery.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Asus Maximus Formula.

There was a guy not associated with Asus that was fixing problems with the bios over on some forum.

 

[Maxspeed996]

Best: Asus P4PE

I had this board...it worked awesome

 

[PhoenixEnigma]

Worst would have to be an MSI NF980-G65, as it caught fire.

Best would be some eVGA 590 SLI board who's exact model I don't recall. Abused it to hell and back (even replaced the chipset heatsink with a thermal-epoxied mess of metal) and it's still running strong in my parents media PC.

 

[Eug]

Agreed. It's almost like Abit engineered instability at stock just to make sure it would overclock better.

Except the instability just got worse with more overclocking of course.

To put it another way, nobody in their right minds bought Abit boards to use to run their businesses.

 

[richaron]

Oh man, EPoX were so great back in the day. Kind of like ASRock is today, but even better on the price/performance curve. I still have my old 9NDA3J kicking around somewhere

Damn straight EPoX were the bomb. Those boards had top of the line performance, before the times of the ~big few~, & gave nubs like me enough tweaking options to "open my mind" and learn the ropes... after I smoked my fav' cpu & my ram no longer worked (at different times)..

 

[piasabird]

Frankly I thought Asus was good for a while but I quit using them in favor of Intel. Technically Intel only designs the motherboard and someone else makes them.

The worst motherboard I ever used was made by FIC. It was pure junk and never ran stable playing any game or any kind of software. Just pure junk. Maybe I just got a Lemon, but I saw plenty of them on sale on ebay.

 

[piasabird]

Intel DZ68DB Works great. What is overclocking? Been doing great since i quit using Asus motherboards.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I suppose that depends on whether or not it was showing "CMOS Checksum error" or "BIOS Checksum error".

If the BIOS checksum failed, then the BIOS got corrupted (bitrot, due to age, flash cells lose data over long periods of time), and needed to be re-flashed.

If it was just a CMOS checksum failed, then yes, it needed a new CMOS battery.

It was a BIOS checksum error, The CMOS battery had died and been replaced a couple of years earlier

Anyhow, it was a long time ago, but I remember it well as my brother took the mobo out of the chassis and mounted it to the wall. I'm pretty sure he still has it mounted to his wall.

 

[Jimmah]

Anything i've ever owned by Foxconn. Nothing like cpu temps staying at 40c, chipset instabilities, PCI x16 lanes at x4 for no reason, unfinished BIOS's, etc etc the list is enormous.

 

[Eug]

Do you own any Apple hardware? Cuz Foxconn makes a lot of Apple stuff, including motherboards. Some of the older Foxconn stuff in Macs is even labelled with Foxconn's name.

However, I guess that's not the same as fully Foxconn branded hardware.

 

[Remobz]

Best: Asus P2B.

The Abit BH6 was popular amongst the overclocker geeks, but the Asus P2B was way more stable.

I had no ends of problems with the ABIT BH6. Worst board ever.

 

[mfenn]

Do you own any Apple hardware? Cuz Foxconn makes a lot of Apple stuff, including motherboards. Some of the older Foxconn stuff in Macs is even labelled with Foxconn's name.

However, I guess that's not the same as fully Foxconn branded hardware.

Running a factory is a hell of a lot different than designing something from scratch though.

 

[bryanl]

Some socket 7 ECS boards. One was incompatible with IBM/Lexmark keyboards, another with certain AGP cards, and BIOS updates sometimes introduced more bugs than they fixed, such as reducing IDE hard disk maximum capacity, not letting the mouse work, or preventing disk I/O if memory ECC was used.

 

[MonkeyK]

Worst is the motherboard on any Dell I have ever owned.

 

[pyjujiop]

The best, strangely enough, was probably the FIC VA-503+ that I used back in the Super Socket 7 era. That board would run any Socket 5 or 7 CPU ever made, would run on SDRAM or EDO, and overclocked anything that could be overclocked. I had it for 12 years, long past the point when it was viable as a main rig, before I passed it on to someone who was working on a vintage computing project. For the last several years I had it, it was running a K6-III+ at 600 MHz with 512 MB of SDRAM.

The worst? That's easy. A Leadtek board from about 2002, WinFast something or another. Worked great for a while. One night, I was smelling something burning in my den, and I discovered it coming from the computer. I opened the case up, and the next thing I knew, the caps around the CPU socket were literally going POW! and shooting sparks, one after another. I've never seen a board die so dramatically. I went to the utility box and cut the power to that outlet, and the caps quit blasting. It wasn't the last time I ran into bad Chinese caps, but it was the worst by far.

The only good thing about that episode is that, amazingly, neither the CPU (Athlon XP 1600+ at 1813 MHz) nor any of the expansion cards were damaged. I fired up the old machine with its trusty VA-503+, send Newegg an RMA, and had a refund by the next morning. I guess my story got their attention!