Well, I had no issues with a $40 ECS mainboard for almost ten years, got burned by Gigabyte and their shoddy BIOS (overwrite data in the last sectors of the hard disk, resize it to 8 MB using HPA commands, old/wrong AHCI ROMs from a different chipset/controller, unable to boot from USB 2.0, crash on boot of Linux with C1E enabled and fun like that) and now ended up with AsRock. Which has its issues too (fan control isn't the most sophisticated, power consumption is a bit on the high side), but at least worked out of the box (and it only needed one firmware update so far).

So my experience basically is: The lower the price, the less issues I had. Which of course is biased.

I agree with that.

However, there are some chipsets I will avoid at all costs due to bad experiences...

VIA
Intel

I've had repeated pains with chipsets made by these two. Also one other reason I refuse to go with Intel. Hardware burnouts in less than a year, multiple hardware failures, various driver and software issues, and numerous other issues.

I only now stick to:

AMD
SiS
Nvidia

Good experiences with almost nearly no problems.

Greetz
I have no serious problem with brand loyalty and only a little with brand hatred. Plus I can easily see with Intel being a large part of Wintel (bullied) Domination for decades, and now with the revelation that Intel, even after their scorched fingers from the serial number debacle, is found to have worked with NSA to make encryption easy for them to spy on citizens who own PCs w/ Intel hardware, that they can be easy to hate.

However that really has no bearing on whether they make good or fail hardware or not. There are few classic chipsets with the track record of ye olde 440BX. In the past I was not altogether fond of Intel CPUs and Chipsets because they lacked features and were locked against overclocking. That said, they did have a reputation of being "Volkswagons" - stark, but reliable... which generally were greeted with yawns, since everyone lusts for a Ferrari.

The point and my question is, since I doubt anyone would venture to say that Intel CPUs are fail junk, I assume you, Reaper, are referring to chipsets when you claim Intel is unreliable. Is that so? and if so, is it possible that this is more "brand loyalty/hatred" rather than MTBFs? It certainly seems with the CPUs you chose to compare and your conclusion from that, that you are brand biased, and that's OK if you keep that essentially to yourself. It is not OK to pass off your bias as fact. It can be hurtful to others and makes the perpetrator look foolish.

Hello!

This is my first post so please forgive me if I'm wrong about something!

When I bought my last mobo my biggest hassle searching for one was finding one with conventional PCI slots. I got this snazzy Delta 44 sound card that I would rather not live without! In fact I'm so fond of that card that I might buy a backup and the same with the mobo since I reckon it might be the last call(s) for mobo's with conventional PCI slots. So my choice was this fella:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4519#ov

The page might make it look like something for blue LED segment but I'm very satisfied with how it works out of the box. The onboard graphics works quite well but I did throw in a nvidia card since I find it easier to set up. The thing I feared the most was that UEFI hulabaloo but since I don't need a billion partitions for the triple boot setup that's on it I use legacy boot which works just fine.

Oh, and 14.1 runs very fine on it compared to the other distros I've tried on it

That's my 25-øre

PS: I had some issue about ÆØÅ setting up my keyboard with resent versions of Slackware when I was installing, would that be a big enough issue for a new thread?

Hu? They are all over the place. Reason is, that Intel is rather restrictive with PCIe lanes in their desktop chipsets and mainboard manufacturers supplement the few PCIe slots with PCI slots behind PCIe-to-PCI-bridges (native parallel PCI got removed from chipsets a long time ago).

Just look, this thing has four (!) PCI slots in 2014: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4569#ov

With regard to video drivers intel and nvidia are the same unless you are very familiar with both the intel driver and your intel graphics chip so you can fix every problem by yourself.

Both intel and nvidia drivers get updates quite often. The general rule is to NOT follow the updates whenever possible because the next update will most likely crash your currently working system.

Remove http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html from your bookmarks and your will no longer be bothered by nvidia updates.

Driver updates are a good thing, not a bad one, IMHO, but still something that is totally optional, so I don't see why anyone could be bothered by its frequency. I follow the development of the free radeon drivers somewhat closely. Which means nothing more than installing occasionally a new kernel and a few packages, like Mesa. Nothing that needs more than half an hour of actual work (this is where a somewhat fast multicore CPU becomes quite handy). Intel releases changes to its stack quarterly, I don't see that as to much.

Not always :-(

The last nvidia driver that doesn't introduce strange signal masks to KDE on my computer is ver. 319.49.

Have you reported those problems to the driver developers?

No, because it's already reported everywhere on the web. If they (nvidia) had a bug tracker then I would have added a post there then.

Well, that is the problem when using proprietary drivers, you are dependent on the manufacturer. This is why I use the free drivers with my AMD hardware (the proprietary driver sucks), the developers react fast to bugs and are very helpful.

I don't know why despite all modern advances of the motherboard and processors, they don't build one motherboard with integrated processors and RAM memory, as they did with sound, network and video cards, maybe I'm wrong, but the price could be less than doing these things apart as its done nowadays. Does anybody know any motherboard with the processor built in it?

IMO price would be higher if they hard soldered RAM onto the board. Makes RAM upgrades impossible as well.

If you really want, intel atoms are build with the CPU soldered onto the board. They are no cheaper than an AMD equivalent..in fact probably more expensive than AMD.

Dont use passmark to compare CPUs if there is any other option.

Passmark is not much of a benchmark, and you have no idea how the different CPUs have been setup (e.g., what chipset, how much RAM, what speed RAM).

FX-9XXX is pretty much just a 'factory overclock' with the TDP to match. 220 watt TDP? Insane. If you think a 220 watt TDP isnt insane, you can get a similar effect with overclocking a FX-8350 with a good CPU cooler and save $100+.....

VIA were always a bit dodgy from KT266 onward.

Intel has been all over the place, the newer chipsets are pretty good.

AMD disappeared for ages. IIRC they sold teh chipset business they had to nVidia, who modded the AMD 760 chipset into nForce 1.

nVidia nForce 1 was good, nForce 2 was amazing, and its been downhill since then. You cant even get a current nVidia chipset anymore, its just 6150/7025/7050 'budget' chipsets which are years old.

SiS..wow, long time no hear that name. SiS hasntmade a chipset for ages now, even longer than nVidia, and you cant get any SiS chipset for current CPUs.....

440BX was popular well after its time because its sucessors sucked and had a stupid RAM limit (i810, i815, typically 512MB max) or were stupidly expensive and used crazy RD-RAM (i840).

Lots of intel chipsets did support overclocking, but were quite often locked out by the manufacturer.

The AMD chipsets (and chipsets for AMD by others) tended to not be locked because of buying patterns.

Sure, lots of people did want the 'sexy' chipsets..but they are long gone now for intel, because intel realised that it was movi+gn back to market domination (or to be more accurate, reclaim the 'performance crown') with the Core2Duos, and deceided that they would not give out any licences to 3rd parties to make iX chipsets).

These days, intel chipsets for intel CPUs are your only choice. AMD, you can stil find nVidia chipsets, but avoid them, they are rather awful. If you go AMD get an AMD chipset.

@cascade9: Thanks for the answer. I read that the 1150 contacts of the motherboard's processors and memories are gold plated, and if they were welded the expensive gold would not be necessary, and IMHO I think that the price still high is due the little amount (scale) built, but in the future it could come down. You compared AMD with Intel, two distinct manufacturers, and the first one fights to survive against the second one which has a good slice of the world's market, although AMD has very good products as well cheaper and reliable. I had several computers and never did memory upgrades, I just upgrade the whole things due obsolescence.