hi LQ fellows,

I'm planning out the purchase of a new PC and am looking for motherboard recommendations. Think new fangled UEFI stuff sounds like a PIA but it seems to invasive. I've been fighting driver issues with my current rig for years and don't want to deal with that any more.

Has anyone recently built a debian system who can recommend a motherboard for a nice smooth install?

Here is what I'm looking to accomplish;

OS : Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit
Proc : mid range i5, LGA1150 looks to be commoun
Use : Web, MS Office via Wine32, light gaming (KSP)

I'll be using an external video card with SSD for the root&home partitions.

Pretty sure Intel boards offer you a way to disable uefi.

Might have to play with add on video card.

yes, I've been doing some research on UEFI..

http://www.rodsbooks.com/linux-uefi/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

have been helpful. It sounds like it can be made to work with some prep of the boot media. Which is good because it seems like you can't avoid it these days. You've got to build bypasses.

So it comes down to what modern chipsets play nice with nix. My approach in the past has been to buy older hardware, my last refurbished Lenovo has soured me on that idea.

It's not such a huge transition. I find it somewhat more flexible than the usual BIOS.

Two known good mobos that I just bought are:
Gigabyte GA-H87M-DH3
ASRock H87M

Chipset works well, only had to update the firmware on the ASRock because USB wasn't working properly in the UEFI menu, and the ethernet card works well but doesn't have any download/upload statistics yet. I guess the Gigabyte would be the better one.

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't use UEFI secure boot anywhere. GPT with bios_grub partition worked fine for me so far, with any board.

Get the cheapest board that meets your requirements, if Intel is more expensive it isn't worth the price IMHO. My last one (a DP35DP) had some issues and went out of favour (no bios updates) rather quickly. Last time I trusted Intel for anything other than their CPUs.

I would have to agree that Intel mobos are likely not worth buying. I also had one and it did have some issues. Look for reviews on mobos to weed out any serious issues with them. Pick the highest rated one from a number of sites and you should be good.

I think he means Intel socketed MoBo's not Intel branded MoBo's

Thanks guys, that's just the info I'm looking for.
My local store has the Gigabyte board in stock. And right on the price point

metaschima - were you installing slackware?

Yeah, slackware64 14.1 is installed on it, and it works fine. No issues so far for the gigabyte board, and I bought it because it had good reviews.