Thus spake Woodsman:
I often wonder the same about myself. Good luck on your new system.

Yes I am using an ultra durable model. Its OK, but not as durable as mobos of yore (I still have a running 16 year old k6 one).
Modern ones will live for a few years with the ultra durable ones an extra few. But then again why do we need mobos to live for so long, my current pc is what, N x 10000 times more powrful?

With full PC I meant cpu+gpu+ram+mobo+power+disc(s) and since I have no idea what does Woodsman has at the moment, then its possible that those two would be enough for a complete upgrade.

VESA? Now you are just being contentious.

Yes but with the Intel drivers that is done upstream. I appreciate you don't prefer Intel integrated graphics. Let the subject drop now, okay? :)

Yes, I have noticed complaints in reviews about thin boards.

A caveat to that approach is I want future-proofing. I want to buy state of the art this time around. The latest 4th generation Intels looks nice albeit a tad pricey.

I am prepared to build my own system, but yesterday I looked at pre-built options. The oft-mentioned Linux vendors are expensive. Further, I'm not Rocky Balboa. I don't advertise on my clothing and I don't want vendor labels on my computer hardware. I know, sounds anal. :) Regardless, by the time I fine-tuned the orders the prices had climbed considerably from the stock prices. I haven't shunned the idea of buying turnkey, but convenience can be costly. :)

I'm not a gamer and don't need a dedicated GPU. On-board or integrated is fine.

This too I have noticed. Unlike the thinner boards mentioned above, there are high-end boards that are purposely built as described.

Yes, this will be a new system, at least all that is inside the case. New PSU, motherboard, RAM, CPU, SATA III hard drives, of which I'd like the "system disk" to be SSD.

A quirk about all of this is late last night I realized I don't know where I'd put the new system. The office is well filled. The desk is well filled too. The existing system is not obsolete and will be useful for various projects and testing. I might have to use a KVM to keep using the new and existing office systems, or buy another keyboard and monitor, of which I don't know where to place. Oh well, as my best friend used to say, these are the kinds of problems we like to have. :)

Like the almost weekly updates of seamonkey. :) I don't use seamonkey and blacklisted the package in slackpkg to avoid the almost weekly updates. Yet by golly, almost every week my rsync script downloads the pig. Oh wait, Firefox is updated every six weeks --- because that is "kewl." And with every Firefox release something breaks. Often I see statements about total cost of ownership being lower with free/libre software. Not quite. The weekly updates are a chore mostly because, as I wrote previously, update one package and something else is sure to break. With free/libre software there never is a dull moment. :)

Having recently bought a HP Workstation and a custom machine with an (*ugh*) ASUS motherboard, I would only add: I can't really endorse ASUS as their forum seems to be full of ROM revisions and patches. I too am getting too old for that manure...and they don't really support Linux. So I kind of have buyer's regret on that one.

If I were building my own machine again, I'd opt for ASRock or Gigabyte or go with a server mobo. I think the Workstation version of HP's products are probably more reliable than the consumer stuff, though (a) I have no data to support this theory (b) it costs more. But I have no regrets with my HP machine, it is reliable.

I wish I still had my Northgate keyboard.

I just installed Slackware 14.1 today on this motherboard.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H77M/

No hiccups so far. It has UEFI but its configured OFF by default.

In the past couple years I have set up Slackware on 4 these Intel boards (no longer available)

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...rd-dh67bl.html

I am using Intel i5 3.0 Ghz and 3.2 Ghz and I'm using the built in HD graphics. Works good on all of them at 1920x1080.

No problems with ASUS here at all. Having a high number of ROM revisions and patches is something that I would consider as good, not as a bad thing, at least they fix their stuff.

Something I wouldn't recommend at all, at least stay away from their low-price segment.
Which is quite funny, they make good mainboards, but have no interest in Linux support, so you should be as opposed to them as to ASUS.

Any particular reason for that? I was looking at ASUS but their current quality seems pretty poor. I know they had a good reputation in the past but that seems to be a thing of the past. So I ditched looking at ASUS and I just bought what you call a low-price segment ASRock and Slackware 14.1 installed flawlessly on it.

Yes, my experiences with working in RMA for PC manufacturers.
I would like to know how you did come to that conclusion. I had no problems with ASUS boards (and Gigabyte also) and their quality (and functionality in Linux) in the past few years, but I never by mainboards in the low-price segment.I don't think that installing Linux is the problem. How long do you expect that hardware to function flawlessly, that is what counts.

No, I mean, what were the exact systemic issues with the ASRock boards you observed?

When I looked at the reviews of ASUS boards I found numerous unsettling comments like "worked for x days/weeks then died." After seeing these types of comments I took a look a ASRock. In 2011 ASRock got good reviews from phoronix.com for both compatibility and quality.

Actually, I don't know. In large scales it is not the usual workflow to spend time with figuring out what on a mainboard has failed, if it is not working correctly it gets replaced. However, the actual numbers of problems with the "cheaper" boards (like ASrock and Biostar) where higher than those for brands like ASUS or Gigabyte (which one was used by a specific PC manufacturer was mostly dependent on which one made the better price).

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that all boards from a specific manufacturer are good or bad, but that for boards that are aimed at the low-price segment (usually ASrock, Biostar and ECS/Elitegroup) the number of problems were higher in general. Of course there were also some mainboards from ASUS that were giving us serious problems (P5N-E SLI, M2N-SLI), while others from for example Biostar were known by us for their stability (G31-M7 TE, GF7025), but in general one could see the trend.

I have had good success with Asus, although not 100%. After reading many online motherboard reviews I've concluded all motherboards are great and all motherboards suck. Just depends upon who does the final QA testing, who does the packaging, the day of the week, whether the inspectors and packagers are in good moods, etc. Don't forget the influence of the phase of the moon. IOW, buying any motherboard is a crap shoot.

Considering motherboards are a cutthroat business, I'm not surprised all of the manufacturers release products prematurely and not robustly tested. In that respect I'm more comfortable with a company that has many firmware updates rather than none or few.

The product quality that existed 20 years does not exist today. Anywhere.

http://www.northgate-keyboard-repair.com/

I've had some good boards from ASUS and ECS last about 5+ years without really having issues in the long term.

I'd definitely recommend ASUS, but get a model that is at least 6 months to a year old for best support in the kernel or else.

ECS for me has been a controversial topic. I've had a great experience with an ECS PC-Chips rebranded motherboard that was ironclad stable with a SiS730S chipset years ago that had a SiS900 Ethernet, SiS630 IGP, and SiS7018 MCP that all worked well for at least 7 years in an old unit I had until the power supply tanked and killed the whole system. I've been told ECS is crap.

I often wonder if sometimes there are just those random boards out there from just about any manufacturer that are rock-solid stable and finding them is just hit or miss.

What does "quality" mean, in this context?

Not picking on you, just asking.

Yeah well, I 've never had an ASRock or Gigabyte, but they seem to have good reviews and their forums are not full of posts about how they don't work. Maybe there aren't enough people who have them. Looking around at ASUS sites and searching for problems esp with Linux yields a much larger number of hits, at least that's my impression.
Perhaps you have a point; on the other hand I am old enough to remember when there were no flashable ROM downloads and the ROM you had was the one you bought. Their fixes are like software patches; does everything have to be like a beta test?

I think the quality and reliability of these things has gotten worse over the last 20 years, just as the quality of undergraduate writing has suffered now that everyone can "just fix it later" with their word processor. Try writing your draft with pen and paper and typing the final draft on a typewriter: that's real motivation to get it right the first time and avoid typos.

OK, enough old guy rant, you may return to your regular channel (or twitter feed or whatever). Good luck Woodsman, and I'll look at that Northgate link.

LOL! The absence of fixes does not indicate the absence of problems, dude!