Who makes the most reliable motherboards?

[Zak33]

Lo.people

I was discussing proper reliability of motherboards today with an IT dude and we both agreed....very rapidly.. That if we had to buy a mobo that simply needed to be rock solid for as long as possible.....with or without overclocking.....with or without specifying features and functionality.....

Put it together and after three or four years you get the call "somethings broken".... Which brand of board would you just think "well it's highly unlikely to be the mobo so....."

What was the answer?

[pastymuncher]

I have never had a Asus or Gigabyte board fail on me so one of those at a guess. One that I would say it isn't is MSI because every board of theirs that I have ever had has failed for one reason or another.

[abaxas]

The answer is probably whatever dell/hp they are currently pumping out to businesses. Especially if it's been around for a bit.

[jimborae]

Never had an MSI board go bad on me..... But then i've only had one. Asus is good also and Gigabyte with their Ultra Durable range also seem to have good longevity. As for Dell, well lets just say we have a hate/hate relationship. Seen to many examples of blown caps and dry solder joints for me to have any faith in their longevity.

[Zak33]

Mixed replies

It's not a,pc manufacturer...we were talking self builds

[DanceswithUnix]

For that I buy Asus, but minimum of about £60 so they don't skimp on the power circuitry.

[[DW]Cougho]

I would go ASUS too.

[DDY]

The last time I've came across a machine with a faulty MB was back in the 478 Pentium 4 days, back then most of the failed boards I fixed or replaced had dodgy caps.

Years later having used many motherboards of various manufacturers, I still don't have any opinion on who makes the most or least reliable boards. In my experience, past the flood of bad caps some years ago, every board has been as reliable as the other.

[excalibur2]

Well as far back as I can remember have only had Gigabyte or Asus boards and although every CPU and memory I've had\have as been overclocked..the boards have never failed.

[watercooled]

I'm really quite fond of ASRock boards lately. Not sure how well they do in terms of reliability but AFAIK they've improved a fair bit over the last few years and often manage low POST times, low DPC latency and consistently lower power consumption than their competitors. Some of that could arguably be down to simplicity i.e. not having a load of components issuing interrupts, drawing power and taking time to initialise, but they are areas the brand seems consistently good at even with apparent feature parity.

Not sure what you said but if I had to guess I'd say Asus. I've observed a couple of issues with Gigabyte boards myself; not outright fails but multiple issues with serious controller driver bugs causing lockups etc.

MSI had that issue with frying VRMs on AM3 boards but are otherwise pretty solid AFAIK?

And Intel left the business so I guess they're not a competitor? Not sure if you'd include other less consumer-targeted brands like Supermicro etc?

[DannyM]

Hexus says Gigabyte!

http://hexus.net/business/news/compo...-msi-graphics/

[watercooled]

There's not much in it in terms of RMA rate looking at those numbers.

It depends what you factor into 'reliability' I guess, as some issues may not cause an RMA.

[DannyM]

I've owned 3 Gigabyte motherboards and not had any issues. I had an MSI board which had some issues, but that's going back 10 years or so maybe. I've got an ASRock mini ITX boards which I've been really impressed with. One of the Gigabyte boards I'm running is a 775 board, it's been on almost 24/7 for 3 years maybe, it's still going strong!

[Jonj1611]

Well it isn't going to be PC Chips

I have always had Gigabyte or Asus and never had a problem.

Saying that though I still have an old ASRock going strong with an Athlon X2 6000+ in it.

[stevie lee]

my first Asus lasted util I broke the northbridge by overheating quite considerably. think it was 4 years. bios heavily corrupted itself and wouldn't boot.

2nd Asus lasted 7 until graphics overheated due to heatsink falling off. was an AGP board, so had to upgrade everything.

current biostar is 6 years old and 1 month, the 3rd ram slot is a bit flakey if the ram isn't in perfectly straight. don't know why its like that but all seems ok otherwise.

built friends computers with gigabyte, asus, msi all a mixture of up to 7 years old and all still working.


only ones I've had go wonky where:
1 gigabyte, didn't recognie the pci-e slots existed or half the satas, which SCAN did an over the counter swap, and an asus that went faulty after a few weeks that had to be sent back to manufacturer.


so out of all the ones i've built with, msi have had no problems, gigabyte and asus are vying for the unreliable but as i've used them more that would make sense, kinda.


would buy asus or gigabyte though if getting a new one. they just seem better to use for an inexplicable reason.

[Noxvayl]

I'd go for Asus and their WS boards, higher level of compatibility testing goes a long way to ensuring things work well for as long as possible. Their 5 year warranty/guarantee for their TUF series seems to be the best I can find for motherboards as well, although sellers still list the standard 24 month warranty period. Warranties say a lot about how confident the manufacturer is about their product.

When choosing a motherboard I've mainly had Gigabyte, a few Asus boards and tried one MSi board. I'd buy each of them again, but I switch between them in preference based on features provided. Most recently Asus's PWM fan control support got me to buy their board.