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Ask Slashdot: Which Motherboard Manufacturer Provides the Best Support?
New submitter Hrrrg writes: A number of years ago, I built a computer with an Asus LGA 1150 Z87-Pro motherboard. Since the discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, I was hoping for a BIOS update to address them. However, it seems that there will be no BIOS update forthcoming for this 5 year old motherboard. I would prefer not to repeat my mistake with future builds. Can you recommend another manufacturer that is doing better?
Their support is so great, it's almost like they're watching what you're doing.
What BIOS update are going to fix those? They are unfixable without re-architecting the chip. There might be some software mitigations, but good luck with that.
I have had no problems with them.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Avoid Supermicro!
Meltdown and Spectre mitigations will be in the OSes you run. The only thing a BIOS update will get you is updated microcode, but updated microcode is available at the OS level for all major OSes (e.g. Linux, Windows, macOS).
Specter/Meltdown cannot be fixed by a bios update... that's not how it works.
are all about the same and none of them will support a board much past 2 years. After 6 months all your getting is the occasional new CPU.
There's nothing wrong with ASRock but they're not known for durability. I will say I seldom see them on the second hand market which implies that's for a reason.
There's probably some server board makers out there if you want to spend $600 and you'll get your bios upgrades, but you could buy 2 or 3 good boards for that price. Plus the chips they take usually cost 2-3x times as much too.
Basically, it's consumer grade hardware. The best you can hope for is that it doesn't break in 5 years. Everything after that is gravy.
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How did this dumb ass question get posted on / . ?
My thoughts exactly. Supermicro boards are normally used in servers, so their customers have certain expectations. Here is one list of Spectre patches for a bunch of Supermicro motherboards:
https://www.supermicro.com/sup...
If anyone missed the news, just recently it was discovered that the Chinese manufacturer added a very suspicious chip to a small number of Supermicro boards. That's obviously very bad news.
I hear the KT7 is a good mobo.
The chips Intel are putting out still have the same deep flaws as before, slower and are more expensive than AMD chips. Why in hell are you still wanting to use an Intel chip?!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Supermicro provides lots of hardware for cloud providers like AWS, Softlayer, etc... I run several VMware clusters that employ a few Supermicro and I've come to learn that Supermicro doesn't care. I've applied firmware updates to all my bare metal hypervisors except the supermicros and it's my plant to replace them all with another brand. But of course, this is server class hardware. I've been using MacBook Pro for the past 10 years so I don't even know anything to recommend anymore. Good luck!
ASUS.
They have the best support. You are unlikely to get better from someone else.
Having recently used Asus, ASRock, MSI and Gigabyte products for some builds for friends, I would say Asus. ASRock had some questionable at best soldering on the boards (x299) I've seen and their BIOS translations and documentation were sketchy. MSI had a bunch of good things but other things that weren't well designed. I also came across information that was flat out wrong in the manual for the Z2370 board I was working on. Asus seemed to have good documentation and translations in bIOS and a quality built product. Gigabyte seemed to be almost entirely lacking in documentation for the board I used (the manual was less than 80 pages that came with the board). They did seem to do a pretty good job on the build quality though, and I didn't OC on that build so I can't comment on BIOS options.
TLDR: None of them are garbage, but I think the tier list for physical build quality is something like:
Asus > Gigabyte > MSI > ASRock
And from a software/documentation perspective I would say:
Asus > ASRock > MSI = Gigabyte
Just my .02 having built 6 rigs for others in the last year or so.
If you line about 50 of them on their sides and hold them together with duct tape, they support my 55" HDTV.
A BIOS update can't fix a CPU design flaw!
Why would you expect Asus to fix Intel(and AMD's) design problem?
Why the fuck are we not DEMANDING new CPUs from the vendors?
Why the fuck are we tolerating a 40% reduction in performance to work around or defend against a design defect?
Intel and AMD need to replace the CPUs with properly designed chips that perform at the stated spec.
ANYTHING less is unacceptable BULLSHIT!
And avoid Intel, AMD. Go with PowerPC
MSI did the right thing with their AB350-gaming motherboard, an early, budget Ryzen board. They kept the firmware completely current even though that board was quickly superseded by AB350-gaming 3. At first I really had my doubts whether MSI would stand behind that early board, and maybe I just wasted my $100, but they surprised me favorably. Not only does the board seem to have no serious flaws that they couldn't patch up with a firmware update, it's been a really good performer. More than 150 days uptime at one point, only ended by a power outage when not plugged into UPS. Oh well, it was time to update the kernel anyway.
MSI's prompt firmware updates were particularly important to fix the lockup issue Ryzen chipsets initially had with some power supplies under Linux. MSI released new firmware within days of AMD distributing the fix.
The whole point of that build was to have a workstation class box at budget price. I would definitely go MSI for the next build, but that isn't going to be budget, far from it. It will be a high end Threadripper build. I'm addicted now, you see. Vendors stood behind their products so I will stand behind them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
... 5 year old motherboard ...
Good luck. In the land of consumer electronics, things that old need to be carbon dated.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
At least in Sweden. I have had to deal with their tech support many time. On the few occasions that they have actually accepted a return (laptops) for repairs that have taken their time and the unit has been in worse shape than when it was shipped to them. Usually it also involves some bickering about the wanting you to sign away all your rights according to EU/Swedish law and accepting to pay them a huge sum if they decide it wasn't a manufacture error.
ASUS is a great motherboard manufacture, and has been for a long time. Even when I use other motherboards ASUS is still one of the top tier in my book. Finding a better one....
Your motherboard is using the z87 chipset
Not just ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI (other good motherboard makers) also don't have released microcode
https://www.asus.com/News/V5ur...
https://www.gigabyte.com/Micro...
https://www.msi.com/news/detai...
You'll have to rely on the OS patches.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
IBM provides firmware patches for POWER9, so your Talos II workstation is protected from Spectre and Meltdown.
In addition, When secure boot is properly configured, and if the mainboard is located in a physically secure environment (e.g., a datacenter or locked workstation case), you can be assured that only your pre-approved and pre-audited firmware, kernel, and user space components are executing on a Talos II system.
Priority is keeping my data, mine; secondary priority, is fixing the tech when things go wrong.
Who expects 5 years of free support for a consumer computer hardware product?
Unless you're a large vendor who is willing to pay for extended support from the manufacturer, I don't think you're going to have much luck finding any vendor that will guarantee 5 years of support.
Did you ask the manufacturer how much they would charge for a custom BIOS? Get a few thousand other people together who also want support for that product, and you can probably even afford it, though it's probably still going to cost more than replacing the motherboard with a newer one. Can't find 1000 other people that also want to use that 5 year old product? Well, that's the same reason the manufacturer doesn't support it - that's a lot of
If you care about getting a quality long life motherboard buy a Dell or HP business desktop/workstation. Seriously.
All the 'gamer grade' parts motherboards are total crap these days. When every company pumps out 20 motherboard models every year you can be pretty sure they are all going to have broken unsupported BIOSes on them, and who knows what kind of quality in terms of the actual PCB. They simply do not have the volume per individual board to do any better, and nobody in their supply chain cares one lick. "sell and forget" is the mantra in that world.
Dell and HP make ONE desktop/light workstation motherboard per CPU cycle and sell huge numbers of them. They care about getting it right and provide good long term support.
About the only downside is you have to get a fairly expensive model to support a large high power dual slot GPU. But if you don't care about the GPU, prices are surprisingly competitive
No spectre, no meltdown, support unmatched.
ARM though, no x86,
Which is one of the reasons the quality is so good.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not had a problem with Gigabyte. Asus products have been working well too.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It is also not necessarily true that it even happened, actually. You forgot to mention that minor detail.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What is the best mobo brand. Honest tech goobers don't ask for support, so you won't find a good answer.
The microcode is just a module in the BIOS image. Use the Google and get a tool that can suck the BIOS out, update whatever component modules of the BIOS you want to change, re-assemble the BIOS image and plop the damn thing on the BIOS flash.
There is and never has been anything difficult about BIOS updates and end-user customization of the BIOS modules.
Why do you want the manufacturer (who only provides support for the 6 month warranty period) to do what you ought to be doing yourself?
occasionally they respond and a few times I even recognized some english.
Well, I have not been excited about ASROCK. I called for a week about a problem with my system and everytime I called I got the same ONE person I truly believe that they only have one person doing tech. support so I won't uses them again. This guy didn't even know that MOBOs beep to indicate troubles. I was shocked that a MOBO producer would have such a lame support. In the end the problem was that my video card wasn't being seated correctly as the case was preventing the card from being fulling inserted. But they were no help in telling me what the blinking lights on the MOBO indicated besides blaming my power supply without asking a single question, in addition to not know what the lights meant. Totally clueless. That was two years ago and I'm still pissed off about how bad they were.
... you never had to call.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
From what I've read these problems can't be fixed by any kind of bios update. The only mitigations will be through microcode updates to your cpu or updates to your operating system. Also from what I've read Intel does not provide microcode updates for any cpu older than the 6th generation so if you have a 5th generation or older all your going to get is operating system mitigations. I don't use AMD cpu's so you'll have to check what generations of their cpu's have updates available and if you have an older AMD cpu then you're out of luck.
This "spy chip" is supposedly limited to certain SuperMicro motherboards. But am I the only one getting a little antsy about the possible inclusion of such a chip on the garden variety motherboards we mighty be buying?
Been using them for a decade+, never needed customer service.
...
asus, msi, gigabyte are the 'big three' in the retail segment. all three have shitty support and even worse warranty service.
the rest (biostar, asrock, etc) are several tiers lower than that, even.
intel branded retail boards are the exception, but don't expect driver or firmware updates for anything even close to going out of warranty.
those that sell to oem pc builders like foxconn and pegatron don't support their stuff either.. and the companies that use their boards in systems (dell, hp, etc) don't support them either... except the original system warranty and original shipping configuration (and even then, they sometimes refuse to cover something that's entirely their fault).
I am sure that other manufacturers have tools to slipstream all the necessary drivers into the image for you and make it uefi bootable now a days. But thats why I went with asrock 2 years ago, because they were one of the first to support win7 again fully. No problems so far.
People get brand loyal, but all mobo manufacturers are kinda the same. I usually just use newegg to filter for the features i want (be it usb ports, or sata channels, or dual m.2 x4 slots or whatever) and then buy the cheapest one that meets my requirements. asrock, asus, gigabyte and msi, you really cant go wrong with any of those.
And i wouldn't worry about those vulnerabilities. I am pretty sure there is no like, mass exploit in the wild. Its hardly a reason to upgrade. Maybe intel will release an exploit on the darkweb to spur PC sales soon? It always seemed pretty lame as exploits go, just being able to read some random protected memory. I am sure one day it will end me, but somehow i soldier on.
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Can a BIOS update address spectre or meltdown?
I . . . don't think they can? The fixes from Intel are applied via microcode updates, generally delivered by OS vendors and having nothing to do with BIOS updates.
Am I missing something?
But with only one processor, put in there just one Graphics card.
when the time to upgrade comes, instead of buying new processor+memory+mobo+graphics card, add a second processor, a second graphics card with NVLink or xFire, or more memory as needed, depending on bottle-neck.
More money upfront, but less money and hassle on the long run, and better support, to boot.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
You could try updating the microcode section of your current BIOS if that suits you.
https://www.win-raid.com/t154f16-Tool-Guide-News-quot-UEFI-BIOS-Updater-quot-UBU.html
Honestly. Listen, I know they're being trashed right now but it wasn't them... it was outsourcing 2 layers removed. It's unfortunate that they're young to take the sword for this.
I've been building PCs for over 25 years. I used to love Asus but recently switched to ASRock (Rack) and SuperMicro. Both provided excellent personalized support when I needed it. In fact it was just earlier this week that I emailed SM with a tech question and they responded relatively immediately with a detailed and enthusiastic answer. Not even an initial robo email with a ticket # and false promise to respond in "24-48 hours". It was only 3h.
I hope they get through this. I'm not even sure my board would be targeted... It's a full ATX style, while it seems the targeted boards are blades used in HD racks.
You should have seen their last one...
At the time I wrote that, I hadn't seen anyone question whether it happened. Thanks for mentioning that.
My z77 mini itx board got a bios update to address spectre/meltdown. Its the first update in years and its marked beta, but it exists. I doubt it will ever be marked non beta.
Buy a real workstation motherboard. Here is an ASUS motherboard from 2011 with updates in 2018: https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P8B_WS/HelpDesk_BIOS/
See also: https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1035538
Meanwhile, the ASUS Z87-PRO's Z87 came out in 2013, but despite the "PRO" name, it is really just another consumer board with consumer level support.
I've got an ASRock Z270M-Pro4 board that's been very stable in my i7 build. No-name, low-spec boards go into Dell/HP/Acer desktops and they last a decade or two (and probably longer), and these boards have cheap caps, skimpy VRMs and so on, so a board by ASRock or Biostar with slightly better components couldn't be any worse. I've got a six-year-old machine that runs 24/7 as a server with a Biostar board (think I paid 40 bucks for it) and it still works.
Usually it's hard drives and power supplies that bring a machine out of commission. Motherboards usually only die if a power surge makes it past the surge suppressor/PSU, poor handling (ESD or excessive flex) or due to excessive humidity. RAM seldomly dies and I've never heard of a dead CPU not caused by physical damage or ESD damage (even though when I was 12 years old, I put together a Pentium III machine and used a whole bunch spare parts I had laying around, including the PIII cartridge CPU that I stored away my sock drawer without any ESD protection whatsoever, yet the PIII CPU still worked fine).
The end.
The motherboard whose box is the most sturdy, will offer an excellent support when standing over it.
... 5 year old motherboard ...
Good luck. In the land of consumer electronics, things that old need to be carbon dated.
Seagate used to give 5 year warranty's on their hard drives.
I wouldn't expect many system board manufacturers to continue support after 5 years...
HP will support their corporate desktop and laptops for at least 8 years, often more. And that includes bios updates.
In fact, HP is to thank for all the last microcode updates the Core2 had, Intel made them on HP request and HP was thr only one that bothered publishing them as updates. Too bad it wasn't possible for the Spectre Trainwreck.
Lenovo updates their stuff as well, again only the corporate models (think line, not the crap Lenovo and yoga lines), but they won't go as far back as HP unless a large client asks for it.
Supermicro has always had good support and a crap firmware team, so it ends up being an internal fight. Don't go there.
Asus, MSI, gigabyte... They add crazy crap to their motherboards and have no concept of a corporate line (no extended support for real). The ceazy crap gets in the way of third-party firmware like coreboot, so it is the trashbin in five years :(
Get fucked douchebag.
AMD Ryzen3 Zen2 will be coming out with security fixes and so will Intel's next generation CPUs. Also DDR 5 is coming out making your DDR 4 investment obsolete fast.
It is a CPU problem as stated as the bios can only do so much when the circuitry itself by default generates all sorts of forgone conclusions which is what branch prediction is.
A CPU fix will be needed and none are around. AMD is a little more secure but it too has 2 of the 3 spectre bugs that Intel has.
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, I can recommend another manufacturer, AMD.
These days, computers are plenty fast for most tasks. {...} For most tasks by most users, five years is fine.
Sadly, the hardware vendors don't seem to agree with you.
It seems that if it's older than a couple of months, you're basically on your own.
(Except maybe for the "business" line of some manufacturer like Dell or Lenovo. But definitely the case for separate motherboard manufacturer as in TFS).
Heck, I'm running a laptop that was manufactured August 2012; 6 years ago. It performs just fine. (Disclaimer: I'm running Linux.)
That last part might be the reason why you and I can pull such a stunt, including the latest kernel. The same hardware will probably refuse to run anything more recent than Windows Vista.
(And let me guess, also using Nouveau due to Nvidia dropping support of the embed GPU in your laptop ?)
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I realize this is probably the wrong forum to bring this up -- but Microsoft was pushing a Windows update that included new microcode.
See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4093836/summary-of-intel-microcode-updates