I had any kind of trouble with Intel mothers.
-They are expensive, so anybody would expect for them to be better than the competence, but they are worse.
*Not really more expensive for this class.
-Memory problems: many times, I had memory modules perfectly working on Asus, Gigabyte and MSI mothers, but they didn't worked at all on the Intel ones. (and don't even try to mix different modules. Intel can't handle it).
I wouldn't suggest 'mixing' with any board, Intel demands a certain criteria for trouble free systems but even then all boards experience isses with certain memor modulas.
That one of the main reasons for which Intel mothers are not "reliable" or "stable". After spending too much money on the Intel garbage, and excellent memory, you find that the mother crashes because it just doesn't know how to handle memory modules.
They are likely the most used boards for servers and other work intensive issues and not just their WS XEON boards.
-Hard disk problems. Lots of trouble with installation of Windows on Intel mothers. Hard disk not recognized after rebooting. The problem was that Windows included buggy drivers. Updated ones solved the problem, but Intel did NOT offered the updated ones on his web site, because these drivers were "included" (the old, buggy ones) on Windows installation disk. The only solution was to download the drivers (made by Intel itself!) from other motherboard vendor with updated drivers and same -Intel- chipset, and burning a personalized Windows installation CD.
When is the last ime you visted a Intel support site? I'd suggest you do it asap so you know whats going on:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Default.aspx?lang=eng
-Poor BIOS design. Super simple, but super basic BIOS options. Far, far poorer that any of the competence. Intel mothers, as custom, don't have essential configuration options available to the user. And I'm not speaking just of "advanced" features like memory timings and voltages, but not even the possibility to specify any possible working boot drive.
Considered one of the best BIOS in the industry:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...p-boards-software-visual-bios.html?wapkw=bios
-Poorly featured motherboards. Lots of cheaper-than-Intel motherboards generally offer far more features, like more and faster USB ports, more expansion slots, more SATA connectors... more of everything.
Whats missing?
-Bad physical design. Frequently I had problems trying to connect a video card, and finding that it was impossible due to space conflict with a SATA connector getting in the way, or else. Newer mothers have it solved, but they were late comers, far behind the competence, and it just exposes that Intel mothers are poorly tested, and poorly made. Intel just relies on the trademark "Intel" to sell crappy mothers, and doesn't even care for checking that his mothers work on the real world.
X58 mothers, which were triple-channel, should obviously be designed with 3 OR 6 memory slots, but Intel sold ones with 4 memory slots, and frequently triple channel just stopped working if the 4 memory slots were filled.
-Awful driver web page design. Downloading drivers from Intel is a hell. Finding the drivers is more complex than the competence, but after you find the drivers list, for EACH driver downloaded, you need to click 3 or more web pages with "Terms of Service" agreements and other legalese crap. And after that, to keep downloading the remaining drivers, is necessary to go back 3 or more web pages, click the next driver, and suffer again all that hell... Then you find that the driver downloaded is not the newer one, which should be searched by chipset and not by mother model. And even if the chip and driver is made by Intel, some times it is not available on Intel web page, and the only way to get it is to download it from Asus or Gigabyte, and edit some text installation file so it can be installed.
The list of troubles is large. Just stay away from Intel mothers. Don't waste your money.