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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."
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.
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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.
I think you've somehow missed the chatter about the miniITX boards?
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.
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95