The First Skylake Motherboard To Fail Me: Goes Kaput After Just 4 Months

[eggbert]

No motherboard manufacturer has decent quality control anymore. Buying new hardware these days feels like playing roulette. The DIY PC glory days are long over. Now it's all geared toward gamers, and hardware has idiotic names like "Republic of Gamers" and comes in boxes designed to appeal to 10 year old boys. Sadly, most of it is junk with high failure rates and poor quality control.

I'm not even sure I'd trust any of the consumer garbage Asus, Gigabyte, et al pump out for a true "production" machine.

Meanwhile the pentium pro PC i built in 1996 still powers on. I miss the 90s.

[Hi-Angel]

It would be nice if the "Clear Linux" link actually linked to the distro webpage. This is one constant annoyance with Phoronix. I understand wanting to make more money by baiting your own pages, but this kind of internal linking rather than to the real source really takes away from the value of the articles.

I do agree, that kind of linking makes no sense at all. E.g. I often find articles with an unknown to me abbreviation, linked to the search through the site. So, suppose I want to know the meaning, clicking the link, and… I am on the page with a bunch of articles that mention the abbreviation instead of the explanation! What a nice link!

[darkcoder]

MSI worked well for me, both the mobo and an old 7870 video card. I retired the whole computer when moved to the States.

[Adarion]

My 2 or 3 cents

UEFI in general is crap. Totally bloated, insecure and full of bugs. Failure by design.
I so wish Libre/Coreboot had wider support.

Asus They were once known for good quality. That is history. As others said, their quality controls aren't what they used to be.
Horrible ACPI tables, flakey onboard NICs (might be the fault of Atheros in that case, too, but things got worse with each BIOS update). Make use of strange SuperIOs on recent boards.
Does support system independent firmware flashing, though.
Support is a mixed bag, too. Probably depends on the person you get to write to.

AsRock Used to be made from the trash they sweep out with the broomstick at Asus but quality has increased as far as I can see. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to be better than Asus by now - and I intend to take them up into my list of choices for the next mainboard.

Gigabyte YMMV, but seemed acceptable, at least from the boards I can judge. Also makes semi-custom boards for some thin clients. They also have OS independent FW flashing for some time now.

Jetway Fairly good, though my experiences mainly reach to VIA based Mini-ITX. Their addon boards are an interesting idea, the bad thing is, they offer 10 sorts of NIC addons, but only one storage (SATA) module and that comes with those pesky Marvell chips (and Marvell is utter crap).

VIA I guess they made their EPIA series on their own. I have one but no time to get closer to that board yet. We all know, though, that their chipsets were of varying quality and that they kind of invented SFF mini-ITX and low power x86 (about the same time as Transmeta). They had some really good ideas but sadly they failed putting them to reality. E.g. HTPC capable boards but noisy fans, and lack of good GPU support in Linux (no Windows person would have used those weak-in-terms-of-raw-power boards, but the Linux people were all after it - but then not having a decent support for the GPU acceleration... is bad). Luc and others can sing you a sad melody about GPU driver development for VIA chips...

MSI Had them in the past (<= Athlon XP times, KT133a) and it was okay. Not awesome but okay. Haven't had MSI for a longer time.

Soyo Fairly good but afaik no longer in operation.

Shuttle Not sure they are doing normal mainboards any longer. Little experience with them.

Zotac I only had the pleasure to deal with their pre-sales support and it was actually a pleasure. That guy was really helpful and found out a lot about several chips on the mainboard. Once I had the money the boards was sold out. *sniff* Will give them a try in the future once they make some AMD based Mini-ITX again.

Teco Might be one of the least known boardmakers, but the thin client boards I have are of very good quality (at least the AMD Geode LX series). Clean ACPI tables, too.
I guess my SiS SoC TC is also a Teco board. It lacks a serial port, sadly (but has LPT) and I have problems with the SiS PATA interface - but that is a matter of the SiS SoC <-> Linux kernel interaction.

Foxconn Can't say much here, but employees didn't seem to be so happy. (Might apply to other manufacturers, too, though, but those made press.)

Quanta and others Can't really say much here - but those things are used in Laptops all over the world. Dell, hp, Acer, whoknows.

Biostar Don't ask for support. Don't ever expect firmware updates. Aside from that they deliver fairly good work for the price. Good thing: They used Linux-compatible SuperIOs / ECs on some Kabini boards. So besides being a clueless company I can't complain about the boards I have.

Elitegroup / ECS I had a laptop from them with a VIA C3-2. Oh, well. It was one of these all-VIA designs, withs its pros and contras. The build quality was actually good, especially for the price. Actually, that was one of the best laptops I had seen for a long time. A huge lot of interfaces, 4:3 non glare screen and still better than most 16:9 1366 x 786 crap today (many years later!), fairly good keyboard (key, layout), touchpad was okay, the only things that sucked were the usual occasional hicups with xf86-video-via/unichrome/openchrome (that one saw all three drivers), the noisy fan and the low battery runtime (4 cell batt. pack). But at its time it was probably the cheapest laptop in the world so you can't really complain.

QDI A pal of mine had one. He said it was pure horror and I believe him.

Yakumo No longer in service for mainboards. Board got strange after some years, iirc. one IDE port stopped working (no visible damage). Lasted a few years of daily use, though.

Others: Never had them. I always wanted a fat multi socket Tyan board, though.

Some things got better with mainboards - but due to financial pressure (well, what they call f.p.) things also got worse in other areas. What makes me really sad is all this cent-saving behavior. They save a few cents per mainboard by leaving out things that would really benefit the advanced user. Also more and more stuff is integrated. And this contradicts the thing that made the "PC" an aweseome platform: modularity. Everything could be exchanged / repaired, swapped, added, removed. ISA, PCI, just put in a card and add functionality. Something broken? Take out the card, plug in a new one. Update CPUs in their sockets, add more memory. Lots of interfaces, pin headers. All standardized.

[theriddick]

I don't think much of Gigabyte, had allot of their stuff break in past. ASUS is ok, personally I like Asrock for reliability (least from memory their stuff never failed on me).

Now that I remember it, I have had ASUS boards come with dead onboard audio, that's annoying.

[bug77]

Michael Why did you need a new motherboard? The Gigabyte couldn't have possibly been out of warranty.

Adarion I have an AsRock mobo, they too support system independent firmware update (their UEFI can actually pull new updates from the net directly, which I thought was nice).

[Mike Frett]

Out of all the Computers I have built since 1998, those with a Gigabyte Mobo were the worst. I don't think I would accept one if it were free.

[SpyroRyder]

So speaking as someone who has an Asrock Mobo, admittedly one of those hated gamer versions because it came with the specs that I wanted, I can say that they perform pretty damn reliably. It's been going for two years through 3 different graphics cards (one was the intel inbuilt), several different hard-drives, a ram upgrade, and 2 different PSU's. The UEFI stuff hasn't given me any headaches and is reasonably well set out, although it was quite weird to see icons in it for the first few times i booted it up. I also haven't had any issues with any of the hardware of the ports or connectors, only problem I had was with some network driver issues when Windows 10 first dropped. Can't say anything about UEFI upgrade-ability from different systems, if I have to I prefer doing it from the UEFI itself. I would recommend them.

[complainer]

It would be nice if the "Clear Linux" link actually linked to the distro webpage. This is one constant annoyance with Phoronix. I understand wanting to make more money by baiting your own pages, but this kind of internal linking rather than to the real source really takes away from the value of the articles.

I registered just to +1 this! I absolutely hate websites that avoid providing external links / links to source. Please make the link on "Clear Linux" go to their website, if you want you could put "Clear Linux (more articles)" or something where the "more articles" is an internal link.

[rabcor]

Well what did you expect, it's Gigabyte!