mainboard brands comparison

[bugmenot]

I don't know what I should buy, if I had to now.
An Asus mainboard of a friend of mine died.
I have a Gigabyte, but this is extreme buggy and reached EOL, so no hope for fixing the bugs. It also has USB problems and boots extremely slow. Probably I would buy the cheapest one I can find which has the features I need and is not too noname.

[stevea]

MSI - I had a terrible experience w /a high-end (~$300) MSI mobo a few years ago. I had to underclock both memory & CPU to make this POS stable. MSI offered no help. I'll never buy one again.

ASUS - All my experiences w/ ASUS are great. A little pricey but solid. I'm not an overclocker but when wringing out these boards I've been able to overclock to a shocking rate.

Gigabyte - inexpensive but solid & reliable. Never had an issue. Good choice for a budget system.

Intel - Generally too expensive given the plain-jane feature set, but 100% reliable, no "special features".

[curaga]

Intel no special features? They are just about the only vendor who allows BIOS customization on some boards.

It means locking down some options, changing defaults, and of course the most important part, changing the bios boot pic

[energyman]

so what? my amd board from asrock gives me the choice between three boot pics. And there are tools to replace them (not from asrock). Intel only has special features like 'turn of smm and see cpu die' or 'make gpu even slower than a S3 virge from 1994'

[stevea]

Scuse me - I didn't realize that important features like changing the BIOS pic was available. Perhaps it would cause me to not yawn & look away when I reboot every few months.

[Kano]

BIOS splash is usually the first thing i disalbe

[deanjo]

BIOS splash is usually the first thing i disalbe

That and I also boot using verbose mode. I hate it when splash screens hide possible issues.

[Kano]

Well many users like splash screens, therefore i enable em on hd install. Current dev live images have got no splash enabled.

[Adarion]

Me too. The first thing to disable is full screen splash or something. I want to see my numbers and letters in good old fashioned 80x25. I also hate the precompiled distros that come with a splash during init. If something hangs I want to see exactly what is happening and if it is just maybe dhcpcd which is looking for an IP with a disconnected cable. Okay, there is often a "press Fx" for details but it still sucks. I mean what is so wrong seeing some text scrolling down? Hey, it's even colourful text.
And when the red [!!] appears when a daemon couldn't start I probably want to know that now and probably why it didn't start than later wondering why something just does not work.

[Biker]

Does no one use SuperMicro MB