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

[GreatEmerald]

Interesting. I have never had a board fail on me, not once. I've had several Gigabyte boards, and now an MSI board. But then I don't have a server room that runs 60 computers, either.

[Michael]

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).

I've never dealt with Gigabyte RMA before and after prodding them on Twitter, no response, so figured it's quicker for now getting a new mobo and if I end up being able to RMA it, great.

[rene]

I've never dealt with Gigabyte RMA before and after prodding them on Twitter, no response, so figured it's quicker for now getting a new mobo and if I end up being able to RMA it, great.

I really wonder how people expect RMA / support service via twitter these days - what is wrong with emailing or calling their support instead of throwing random dices on social media, ... ?!?!?

[rene]

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.

Yeah, full ACK. The most annoying form of click bait that is. In the meantime I do not click on links on news sites anymore, and instead directly type the product / company name into the address bar for a proper internet search instead, ... :-/

[bug77]

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.

Haha!
Google ranks pages by the number of links pointing to them (among other things). So if Michael won't link to his own pages, who will? It's a common annoyance, it took me a while till I learned to ignore any links on Phoronix.

Yeah, full ACK. The most annoying form of click bait that is. In the meantime I do not click on links on news sites anymore, and instead directly type the product / company name into the address bar for a proper internet search instead, ... :-/

Or select text -> right click -> search. Works just as well, less typing.

[AdamOne]

Adam, if you don't want UEFI probably you will need an old board. And Gigabyte do use UEFI.

And UEFI is not bad. UEFI systems boot verry fast. Linux distributions these days support UEFI, maybe except for Secure boot. And that comes disabled by default on third party mobos.

Plus third party mobos comes with legacy BIOS support enable by default too, because among things for UEFI to work, your video card BIOS has to support it.

Unfortunately you're right about the older boards, great to know.

When I was installing Linux I was still not recognized as having a bit of an attention-problem, but even with legacy-boot option, didn't Microsoft/Windows 8 make UEFI built in to begin with? I don't see that, or nauseating companies like Microsoft doing anything wholesome for the most part.

Feel free to disagree.

[Kano]

As nothing seems to be burnt most likely the firmware got corruped. If you don't like hotswap in a board with Flashrom support request a new chip. Before reflash use -r option to make a backup. UEFI seems to break more easy as there exist no real CMOS clear as before, everything is stored in flash. The clr jumper only works after the system already initialized.

[bug77]

As nothing seems to be burnt most likely the firmware got corruped. If you don't like hotswap in a board with Flashrom support request a new chip. Before reflash use -r option to make a backup. UEFI seems to break more easy as there exist no real CMOS clear as before, everything is stored in flash. The clr jumper only works after the system already initialized.

Eh, a lot can go wrong on a mobo w/o actually burning. It's a collection of capacitors, chokes, wires and solders after all... Thankfully we don't have to deal with leaky capacitors today, though I see liquid capacitors making a come back in on-board audio solutions (which is dumb, if you ask me, but then again, for the most part people are not smart anyway).

[aht0]

Their quality control isn't that good anymore. Most Asus boards work, but they have little problems like a fan header won't work or a sata port won't detect the drive plugged in. I stopped buying them. Lately I've had pretty good luck with Biostar I haven't had to RMA a board since then.

Had Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0 that did not have working onboard audio from the start. Drivers installed fine (random windows) or were nicely recognized (random linux/bsd), just no signal coming out or going in from plug-ins. Since I used 5.1 discrete card anyway I never requested RMA. Worked 2 years and 8 months like this then started pulling crap like random crashes. Replaced FX8350 with Athlon II X2 550 and put it to work as firewall/router, works so far like this. Expecting it to die sooner or later. Wasn't PSU issue (initially brand new SeaSonic Platinum).

Asus AM1 board. (AM1M-A) so far ticking away all right.

Mixed feelings.

[starshipeleven]

When I was installing Linux I was still not recognized as having a bit of an attention-problem, but even with legacy-boot option, didn't Microsoft/Windows 8 make UEFI built in to begin with? I don't see that, or nauseating companies like Microsoft doing anything wholesome for the most part.

UEFI is a Intel idea and is a board firmware.
MS's idea is Secure Boot, a feature of UEFI board firmware.

UEFI is annoying mostly because those making the firmware are a bunch of morons, not because it is bad by itself.

Anyway, if you configure it right you can get neat boot managers like rEFInd instead of ugly Grub.