Gigabyte Motherboards

[jabjab90301]

What is the deal with Gigabyte motherboards? I have been considering buying a mAtx board for a HTPC AMD build and the reviews for all are horrible on Newegg and Amazon. A lot of died in three months to a year. Is there QC that bad?

 

[Sheep221]

As someone who owned 5 motherboards from gigabyte I can say go for msi, asrock or asus they are much better in everything. The easy tune program is a bogus piece of junk and the budget boards are stripped of features much more than on other brands. However I am referring to sandy bridge and older boards so they maybe are better now.

 

[vailr]

I can recommend this Gigabyte mATX Intel Z170 board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128844
As long as you stay with a board which includes Realtek ALC1150 audio, the otherwise quality should also be good enough for long-term problem-free operation. I prefer Intel CPU's, but I'm fairly confident that an AMD board with ALC1150 audio would also be reliable.

 

[UsandThem]

All manufacturers have a board that has more bad reviews than good. It's called a dud, and Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, ECS, and Biostar all have them.

Bad design, unstable BIOS, and reliability issues are not a Gigabyte exclusive.

 

[cyclohexane]

Never had a problem with gigabyte boards. My old DS3 board from 2006 is still running solid 10 years later.

got a z170-hd3p for my 6700k, and runs solid with no problems.

 

[plopke]

brands can sometimes just have a very wonky year but this my older gigabyte experience(no overclocking/desktop/medium gaming PC).

GA-H77-DS3H (Intel® H77 Express)-i5 3450 - very stable since mid 2012
GA-P55A-UD3 (Intel® P55)-i5-750-mid 2010 - never 100% (±90% stable) , very very iffy with memory, once every few months a bluescreen (tbh it might not even be the motherboard),
GA-P35C-DS3R (intel P35)- Core duo E8400- very stable since 2008


So 2/3 very good results, sometimes i wonder getting asus next , but they always end up more expensive.

 

[lukart]

Had no problems with Gigabyte motherboards, but tons with MSI recently..
I guess sometimes is bad luck..

 

[escrow4]

What is the deal with Gigabyte motherboards? I have been considering buying a mAtx board for a HTPC AMD build and the reviews for all are horrible on Newegg and Amazon. A lot of died in three months to a year. Is there QC that bad?

Why AMD HTPC? The GTX 950 is one of the few GPUs that has proper HEVC and VP9 decoding support.

 

[John Connor]

Never had a problem with gigabyte boards. My old DS3 board from 2006 is still running solid 10 years later.

got a z170-hd3p for my 6700k, and runs solid with no problems.

^This. I have a DS3 as well.

 

[Shmee]

They had some of the best x58 boards.

 

[nemesismk2]

i have owned a Gigabyte GA78LMT S2P motherboard for years and it has never let me down.

 

[ethebubbeth]

Why AMD HTPC? The GTX 950 is one of the few GPUs that has proper HEVC and VP9 decoding support.

I have a GTX970 in my HTPC and it's caused me some (albeitedly niche) problems.

About 2/3 of the time it wont acknowledge that my projector has 23, 24, or 25hz refresh at 1080p resolution. Only 60 and 59hz are available. I have to reboot it several times until they show up in the list.

Also, it doesn't support 88.2khz audio output so I have to resample that to 96khz.

HEVC/VP9 hardware decode are unimportant to me since I do software decode via LAV filters.

I wish I'd gotten another AMD card since I haven't had those issues with their cards.

 

[ethebubbeth]

Never had a problem with gigabyte boards. My old DS3 board from 2006 is still running solid 10 years later.

My anecdotal evidence is 50/50 with Gigabyte.

I have a GA-EX38-DS4 still running strong with a Xeon E3110 sporting a 20% overclock. It has been a model example of reliability since March 2008.

On the other hand, the GA-990FXA-UD3 worked fine until I tried to overclock an FX-8350 a couple hundred megaherz. That revealed how Gigabyte skimped on the power stage on this board and it blew up in a matter of hours.

It really varies from board to board. Any manufacturer can do things properly or skimp from board to board in their lineup.

 

[Killer_Croc]

They had some of the best x58 boards.

I agree but their Revision 2 boards from the X58A series and their introduction of UD9 in their X58A lineup really was confusing especially since they cut-corners by downgrading their phases and also making the UD7 no longer the flagship and making the Rev.2 UD5/UD7 practically identical.

They make good motherboards overall but they seem to lack in features and innovation compared to ASUS (such as USB Flashback, Q-Connectors, etc...). Reliability and stability is just as good for them.

 

[Sonikku13]

Whenever I had a problem with a Gigabyte board, or with any board, it was because I broke it. All my boards have been flawless, excluding one, which is obviously the broken one.

 

[bonehead123]

Well, over the last 10 years or so I've owned Asus, Gigabyte, AsRock and MSI, and only ever had a problem with 1 Asus z87 unit that died on me all of a sudden. I bought it used and used it for ~2yrs, so I was way out of warranty and just replaced it.

More recently I have built multiple rigs for my family and clients, with a variety of the above boards and haven't had any problems at all.

The last 2 rigs I built (Aug '15) were a z97 MSI for my son's beginner gaming rig, and my higher-end Skylake machine (Jan '16) with a Gigabyte Gaming 7 ....both of which were purchased new and continue to run rock solid just like on day 1.