QOTW: Has your motherboard ever failed?

[Saracen999]

I've only ever had, I think, two mobo's fail. One was dead, right out of the box, brand new. The other was, I believe, the result of a significant mains fluctuation. Quite what/how? Dunno. Surge from nearby lightning strike? It was a long time ago.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that that nailed the mobo. It certainly nailed both a £1200 (in those days) graphics board, an Adaptec 4-port hardware RAID board and all four hard drives. And it was a big enough jolt that it physically blew large chunks out of some CMOS on the hard drive controllers, and my office stank of that acrid electrical burning smell for weeks. Literally, weeks.

What surprised me was that the rest of that PC somehow survived it, and the RAM certainly did. The more I think, the more I wonder if the mobo did, too.

Of course, naturally, this occurred about 3 weeks after my UPS battery gave out and while I was awaiting the replacement's arrival. Grrr.

[Feck]

Only 2 motherboards have failed on me. The first was a slot A Abit motherboard, after about a year of running all the electrolytic capacitors started bulging causing random blue screens. The 2nd was more recent, an Asus ROG STRIX Z490-G where the sound card failed.

[maxopus]

Out of the 60 or 70 PCs i've owned over the past 30 years I have never had a motherboard fail as far as i can remember. I guess i've been lucky.

[six_tymes]

twice, but many years back. both were amd chipsets.

[raygdunn]

Nothing major over 25+ years that I can remember.

I did have a laptop where the 3.5mm sound input failed and I used USB headset as a get round.

(Mainly disk failures, including my first SSD after possibly 5 years)

[Brian224]

Twice, both on socket 939. First time it was a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 that just stopped completely. No voltage anywhere so I hoped the Athlon 64 processor was OK. I replaced it with a second-hand AsRock 939Dual-SATA2 (the weird one with the future CPU port and a mass of jumpers) as I wasn't going to spend too much until I could find out if the processor was OK. This was OK for several years in a workshop PC but failed a year or so after I upgraded the processor to an Athlon 64x2.

[Quartz]

In the past 30 years I've had a few. Usually failed capacitors when the board got old, but also a broken retention clip on an Abit VP6 CPU socket.

Professionally I've seen dozens.

[fail_quail]

Yes and no...

My old ASUS AMD FX board didn't completely fail, but several parts on it did.
Near the end i was running with PCIe audio, USB and SATA cards as those components were no longer functional on the motherboard.

[philehidiot]

Only due to my on cackhanded ineptitude.

[tazzrats]

Only one, helped my sister build her first PC, breadboarded everything and turned it on. *POP*.

Only the mobo died.

Turned out the extension cable we were plugged into blew, happy to say all other parts were fine and have never ever plugged a PC into a non-trusted power source again. You learn the hard way!

[BobF64]

1 motherboard, an ABIT IC7-G, bought in, I have to guess, 2003 and replaced by a "used" one from Ebuyer in 2005.
I dont remember what failed on it, but based on an above comment, probably something to do with the northbridge heatsink fan.

I've had more PSUs, GPUs and HDDs fail than motherboards.

[Percy1983]

Last issue was with an Abit AB9 quadgt, a failed bios flash bricked it.

Luckily it was the good old days and the bios chip was in a socket so I got a replacement on ebay and all was fixed.

[Norkay]

Old DFI LANParty A8N, when overclocking an Athlon processor under a self-made waterblock. I was totally at fault there.

More recently: G1.Sniper 3 on Z77 chipset - just died one day.
I have never boutght a Gigabyte motherboard ever since.

[Millennium]

This has never happened to me. Very reliable!
Though I did kill an old athlon mobo with too much DDR volts, they replaced it anyway.

[deepblue08]

My MSI GAMING TITANIUM Z170 failed, I used this machine everyday for work, so I just replaced it with an Asus board to save time.

[dannyboy75]

The only time I had a mobo completely die was my own stupid fault, this was way back around 2000. I was installing RAM into it and forgot to disconnect the mains supply. Think I was also missing a couple of standoffs underneath the board. As I pressed one of the RAM modules down into its slot, the board flexed and touched the metal case underneath. For a moment it powered on and the fans spun up, then it turned off again (permanently).

Other than that, I've had a couple of faulty boards in the last 3 years, both new and both MSI (a Z370 and a B550). They worked but caused system instability. In both cases I RMA'd them and replaced them with Asus boards which worked faultlessly. It does make me question MSI's quality control though.