Is the quality of all motherboard brands really that inconsistant?

[krnmastersgt]

I'd say the P35-DS3L sounds like a good candidate for you, highly recommended from members here, I'll probably be picking one up soon. Don't let the negative reviews scare you when it comes to buying the boards, with most items you get more negative than positive in terms of ratio, if the board works just like its expected most people won't bother posting a review about it online, however if they have 1 little problem then they'll spam the hell out of the item's review list, only a small portion of those negative reviews are justified.

 

[v8envy]

I think tcsenter is dead on right. The high performance low cost boards (DS3L, P35-E, Neo2FR) are bought by enthusiasts who have done at least a bit of research. The research first mindset comes from having built PCs in the past and seems to correlate with having good troubleshooting skills.

Some of the DOA reviews I see on newegg are very obviously the result of chucking high-buck components into a case, flipping the switch and getting angry when it didn't work first shot -- the mindset of 'I paid top dollar, I want it to WORK.' Heck, during my two recent DS3L builds there were at least 3 times I could have erroneously diagnosed the boards as DOA. (Initial boot failure w/ 4 gigs of ram installed, power LED causing a short (?), forgot to flip the PSU switch from 0 to 1 =). All trivial to troubleshoot and the boards are working flawlessly.

BTW, the boards in my OEM HPs were made by Asus.

As far as automotive analogies -- it takes a certain amount of confidence and knowhow to start wrenching on your car. I know plenty of people who will open up a computer case at the slightest provocation and start throwing lightning bolts around like some kind of carpet-powered Zeus. But when their alternator goes out they'll find a billion reasons why they can't fix it. Not applicable.

 

[rchiu]

it's not the motherboard quality is inconsistent, there is just too many variables when you put a PC together. You use different combination of memory, video card, sound card and other add-on, you got different OS and different software installed, and worst of all, you have people who think he/she knows how to put stuff together but many don't.

PC makers have labs to test and develop a few combinations that's been tested and proven to work. They don't use one memory one day and the other another to put their pc together. And they have people building PC's in controlled environment. That's why their PC's have less problem. You'd be very surprised how much memory incompatibility along causes issues in building a PC, and people can easily blame the mobo instead of the memory.