Advice on buying new motherboard for desktop PC

[ljones]

Hello all!

I apologise if this is another one of these "clueless newbie" type of threads but here goes. I was wondering if anyone here could give any sort of pointers or help on choosing a new motherboard at all?

Currently I'm using in my normal desktop PC an Asus M5A88V-evo motherboard with 16GB of ram, a quad core AMD CPU (FX 4100) and an (admittedly old) ATI Radeon HD 4850. Though I'm looking to upgrade from this set of components plus I have no end of trouble with that asus motherboard; every now and then it will completely forget its own cmos/bios settings and/or the built-on USB chipset will crash apon usage(!). I've been through the whole changing CPU/Ram/Board/PSU several times over and none of it made any difference.

So really I'm either looking to get a new motherboard that dosen't have all the bios/usb problems, or just simply perform a complete upgrade and move over to maybe something like an intel based chipset motherboard and CPU. I have looked on phronix's own website and looked through the motherboards though there are only a few new motherboard reviewed -- on the website there's a review of the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme, Intel DH87RL Haswell H87 and ECS Z77H2-A2X. Unfortunatly the ECS Z87 seemed to have audio problems, the Intel DH87RL is a micro atx board (I'm looking for a full ATX board) and I couldn't even find the ECS Z77H2 for sale(!).

One other big point I should mention is that I want to avoid UFEI/secureboot. Are there any modern-day motherboards (~1 year old) that don't have it at all? I only use gnu/linux on my desktop PC, no windows at all. Can UFEI/secureboot be disabled on newer boards at all?

I'm aware of coreboot (could that be used to work around UFEI/secureboot?) but dosen't coreboot only work on older motherboards?

One last thought: Wonder why nobody has tried to produce a full sized ATX ARM based motherboard....

ljones

[ljones]

BTW One typo above I got the motherboard model wrong (and there seems to be no forum post edit command either ). The motherboard is an asus M5A78L-USB3

ljones

[deanjo]

Stay away from intel branded 7 and 8 series motherboards. Ironically enough they have plenty UEFI issues and their BIOS support has taken a deep nose dive since they started farming out their BIOS development to a third party.

[Kano]

Only buy series 8 based boards, series 7 is already outdated. If you get a Z87 board board to oc the cpu you need a cpu with K at the end. I don't know what uefi implementation is the best, but i am not that happy with my asus p8z68v (ok two generations older). It deletes double entries for efi binaries even if the options are different (i verfied that for asus series 7 boards too), but what is more annoying is that i have got a gigabyte gtx 650 ti card with updated uefi compatible firmware. it only boots with legacy firmware first but not with uefi setting there, otherwise one led just blinks on the board. It works with a board with aptio based firmware. What you mainly want to do later is set to W8 mode but with disabled secure boot, with fast boot enabled but with partial keyboard init (most likely usb) and boot within seconds from power on to your system when everything stays in uefi mode (you can disable csm then). You should consider a ssd of course too...

[curaga]

One last thought: Wonder why nobody has tried to produce a full sized ATX ARM based motherboard....

The only one who even tries to be compatible is Via. All their small ITX standards are backwards compatible, ie you can mount mini-ITX or neo-ITX in ATX/mATX cases.

They produce both mini-ITX and neo-ITX arm boards, though the specs are otherwise bad compared to competitors.

[ljones]

After looking about I'm thinking about going for the Gigabyte GA990XA-UD3. On the minus side it's not "new", it dates from 2011. But it seems to be able to do everything my current board can do (but without hopefully the USB and BIOS/CMOS probelms) and no ufei!

ljones

[Panix]

Are Gigabyte motherboards any good at this time? I read that they are recommended for building 'Hackintosh' computers. I suppose this is because of the configurable BIOS? So, is that a good or bad thing for using/configuring in Linux?

I thought ECS and Asrock had made great strides but I'm out of the loop. I figured Asus had lost some ground in overall quality but I read their UEFI BIOS was highly rated but not reading positive reports here?

Can a Z87 system be built cheaply? Under $300? I think many of the i5 processors offer intel 4600 graphics. That'd be sufficient for me, for now. It's tempting... my system is getting old.