gigabyte vs jetway vs asus

[arayan]

hi there,

am thinking of making my own mini itx system that is fanless passively cooled. and these three motherboard manufacturers seem to come up.

i was wondering if anyone would recommend one over the other ?

i'm particularly interested in a good bios / easy bios flashing , and general stability

probably going to use linux with it

thanks

[jim]

Gigabyte and ASUS are both pretty popular, and whilst people may have had bad experiences with each, I don't think there's a lot in it.

As for Jetway, I can't say I've really heard much about them in years... in all honesty I'd forgotten they existed.

Zotac might be worth a look as well, depending on what specs you're interested in.

[Agent]

Jetway used to be terrible with BIOS updates.

You're very unlikely to have an issue with either Gigabyte or ASUS.
I tend to go with Gigabyte as I've found they have excellent support (and a UK support based if things go wrong!). They're very happy to send out beta BIOS when needed and talk about any bugs.

I've had bad experiences with ASUS support in the past and find they update their BIOS slower, but honestly, it's unlikely to make any difference to the vast majority of people.

IMO go with the best performance / features :cost ratio you can between the two.

[arayan]

thankyou !

do you think that both gigabyte and asus will support linux distros equally as well ?

ps, i'm probably going to go for a passively cooled fanless board. the asus ones with an efi boot looks interesting

[DanceswithUnix]

Linux distros aren't so sensitive about the BIOS, and tend to be good at working around bugs in the few bits it does use.

My last couple of boards have been Gigabyte. They were OK, and their support seems better than Asus, but have had some Windows power management issues with them. One was solved by swapping into a machine that runs Linux and never sleeps

Asus boards I tend to find are either dead on arrival or work great. Support is awful, but I prefer the boards and for DOA you are dealing with the retailer. The one I ordered yesterday was ASUS.