3-Way Motherboard Shootout

Steve writes "Hexus.net has put three high-end i955X-based motherboards through their paces, to see which is the best LGA775 platform motherboard. Intel's own offering falls a little short, but Gigabyte and ABIT both make compelling boards, with ABIT taking the top-spot by a small margin."

Comments

high end?

[vbrtrmn]

Wow, no SLi on any of them, I'll stick with my ASUS for now.

Re:high end?

[KillShill]

well thankfully SLi is a useless feature except for the most hardcore gfx enthusiasts.

i consider myself a gfx groupie but i wouldn't touch SLi with a 256ft pole. too much expense for too little return. gfx technology is moving too fast for SLI to become viable to more than a very small set of people.

you're also looking at extra cost in electricity in running 2 gfx cards. extra juice from the PSU is also required; meaning a more beefier unit which most people lack. it also takes up 2-4 slots total depending on the cards in question. it's a good option for the very few who have the money and willingness to go for it. otherwise, save up your money and in 6 months, you can buy a virtually similar performing card in a single slot solution.

if someone can find another reason to buy a motherboard with an extra high speed PCI-e slot... that's another story though.

Avoid Abit High Ends

[superpulpsicle]

I used to think brands really didn't matter. Until I bought the Abit Ka7-100. It was a highend board back around 2000 with 4 Dimm slots and 6 PCIs, 1 AGP. And an ISA slot which could be used when sacrificing the last PCI slot. It was fantastic at the time.

Then the transistors fried. I paid for shipping etc and got a replacement. Then it fried again, replaced, then fried again. 4 years later Abit sends me a letter saying they lost a lawsuit for selling select board models with broken transistors including the Ka7-100. Basically they knew it, and told consumers nothing about it.

Why can't they link directly to this?

[Mechcozmo]

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNjAw

Printer friendly version for everyone so that this (click, load ads) doesn't (click, load ads) happen (click, load ads) to (click, load ads) you (click, load ads).

Re:What about quality?

[hab136]

The leaking capacitors were an industry-wide problem.. it was basically a crapshoot whether or not your board had them.

http://channels.lockergnome.com/news/archives/2005 0801_leaking_capacitors_muck_up_motherboards.phtml

The most important thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only one thing matters. Warranty.
As a Genuine Intel Dealer, I can expect a replacement board to be overnighted even before I send the faulty one back. That way there is minimum disruption to the customer.
Try telling a customer their server is down for a few weeks while you wait for the board to be shipped back to Taiwan/China for testing before they'll issue a replacement.

Had a few customers who got non-Intel boards and had no computer for up to three months while waiting for a replacement. Think about that. That's three months paying for broadband you can't use for some people. The inconvenience cost adds up pretty quickly. Kinda makes a 5% increase in motherboard performance seem pretty irrelevant.

And Intel has a good history of actually fixing mistakes. FDIV bug -> replaced processors. VC820 SDRAM bug -> new board and free RDRAM RIMM.

Oh well. I'll stop ranting but hopefully you get my point.

Re:The most important thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well when the board is a two year old design, compatible boards are hard to come by (think about getting a board that takes a . We keep some spare as a matter of course. But all it takes is a power spike to knock out a few machines and our supply runs out. Wish we could keep a spare board for every customer but there just isn't enough margin in this industry to cover that.

Re:The most important thing...

[Eivind]

Only one thing matters. Warranty.

Maybe to Americans. In a lot of other civilized countries the consumer protection laws are good enough that warranties are completely irrelvant.

Let's take Norway as an example. You have trough law 2 years warranty, 5 years on capital goods that are meant to last significantly more than 2 years. Probably motherboards would fall under this category, but even if not, 2 years is decent for electronics.

If something happens in this period, excluding normal wear and consumer misuse, you have the rigth to a cost-free repair or a new replacement, at *your* option. (that's rigth, you don't have to accept the repiar but are free to demand a replacement part.) Furthermore if you do choose to accept the repair, you've got the rigth to cost-free borrow a similar item for the duration of the repair, if the repair is estimated to, or in actuality takes more than 1 week.

Warranties larger than this are not really needed.

Btw, there are exceptions to the rule that the customer can choose if he accepts repair or want the item replaced, namely when the costs are unacceptable, as in a large multiple of the repair-costs.

For example, if you buy a car, and after 5 months the clock stops working, you won't be able to demand the dealer replaces your "broken" car with a new one. In this case you'd have to accept the repair (with a borrowed-car for the duration if it takes more than a week, which it shouldn't in this case)

Re:Faster, higher, stronger?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think you've somehow missed the chatter about the miniITX boards?

Re:Faster, higher, stronger?

[KillShill]

it's probably not a troll. just another user lacking insightful knowledge in the right context. it's not that legacy components are good but in his case he has no right to complain. a sub-ghz athlon, just upgraded his 9GB hd?

seems like by the time he gets around to upgrading his computer, Terabit ethernet would be long forgotten.

ECC Memory support is extremely important...

[callipygian-showsyst]

and that's why I got a D955XBK in my new dual-core P4 Extreme system. It's amazing how 99% of desktop computer users have NO IDEA if their memory flips a bit every now and then (let alone correcting it!). The Intel MOBO supports ECC memory.

Re:ECC Memory support is extremely important...

[jandrese]

Eh, unless your memory, power supply, or memory controller are marginal flipped bits are pretty damn rare. They do exist, I used to work for a place that had 50+ SGI Challenge XLs loaded to the gills with memory. We had to write special filters in the log watcher to filter out "Single bit parity error" messages, because there would be several of them per day. However, this was over thousands of memory sticks. On the one or two sticks you have in your PC, it's almost unheard of. You're far more likely to lose data due to an OS glitch. It's just extra money spent that probably won't correct a single bit in it's entire lifetime.

Anecdotal evidence: I have an old PII-400 at home with ECC memory. Thus far it has yet to correct a single bit error, despite being on 24/7 since January of 1998.

In other words, are you going to allow for a tiny amount of uncertainty (which may just be noise compared to the uncertainty you get from other parts of the system), for extra performance and cost savings? That's what you need to ask yourself. OTOH, parity checks are an easy way to spot a failing memory module, which can make debugging a hardware problem so much simpler.

What I got out of it...

[ender-]

So basically what I got out of that article is that the performance of all three boards using default settings were almost exactly the same, and that unless I'm using Microsoft Movie Maker, a 2.4Ghz Athlon64 kicks the crap out of the 3.6Ghz P4 Systems with this new chipset.

Yup, I for one am glad that I went with an Athlon 64 over a P4.

Generally Satisfied with ABIT Quality

[dsci]

While I don't have experience with these particular boards, I've have had very good luck with two ABIT models:

KT7E and KX7-333R

The KT7E has been running virtually non-stop for 4 or 5 years; the KX7 likewise about three years. Both have been used constantly for their service life running floating point, number crunching code.

Both boards have withstood cpu fan failures and powersupply failures; replacement of the faulty components and they're up-n-runnin'.

I'd recommend ABIT to anybody with the caveat that I did have some problems with the KX7 until a bios update was done. Since then..no problem.

Though I have to admit, my newer systems are ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxes with Athlon 64 X2's. ;)

those were very likely capacitors

[YesIAmAScript]

Not transistors.

And honestly, many mobo companies had problems with this at that time. There was a company making knockoff capacitors that appears to be high quality components. Many good mobo makers got taken by this. It was covered on slashdot.

I personally won't buy Abit again if I can avoid it, for different reasons. My high end from them is still working, but I had significant problems in the beginning and minor problem all along, and they just never even responded to my queries on their forums.

Their support blows.

[Some Random Username]

My KT7 stopped working the other day. As soon as you boot the alarm screams at you non-stop, even though nothing is wrong in the health section of the BIOS. And it locks up after about 30 seconds of being on, even when you are just sitting in the BIOS watching the seconds tick by.

Their support of course says "check the CPU temp" and calls it a day. Despite me clearly telling them everything is fine in the PC health section of the BIOS, and that I had swapped out RAM, CPU and video card to make certain it was the motherboard. The fact that they can't even bother to read support requests, nevermind give useful support is ridiculous.

Abit motherboards and temperature monitoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Abit motherboards are infamous for reporting incorrect temperatures. I like their motherboard features but I will never buy another Abit board because the usefulness of their temperature monitoring software is greatly reduced when load temperatures are 15 degrees celcius than actual. Most motherboards give inaccurate temperature readings but Abit is the worst that I have seen.

You've gotta be kidding. Aren't you?

[Just Some Guy]

FDIV bug

You mean the one they initially didn't want to fix unless you could somehow prove that it might affect you? I'd be hard pressed to think of a worse example of this magical Intel warranty support you're so proud of.

They may indeed be better now; if so, then you should have picked a case that didn't make people hate them.

Re:three way

[rainman_bc]

Odd, a friend of mine bought a Gigabyte board and had some serious issues with a bad production run.

After a couple weeks and lots of trouble with his machine, he found his board was missing a capacitor next to the processor that later versions had. No mention of the problem on Gigabyte's web site, some guy on a forum found it by comparing an earlier run with a later run to find the missing capacitor. They were good to repair it, but they covered it up pretty good too..

I'm not a huge fan of Gigabyte. Honestly, I've grown fond of Soltek... My last one really gave me no trouble at all, and I think I'd give them another chance, for a less expensive board they are really nice...