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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?
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).
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.
Posted by msmash. 'nuff said.
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.
Not permanently. The BIOS update just includes a microcode update that the BIOS reloads every power-on/restart. Just like an operating system might do it, but earlier.
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
Z170 / Skylake 6xxx is the oldest that will get the Meltdown updated BIOS. This is Intel making that call. Z97 and older are SOL.
There are no good fixes for Intel Meltdown, microcode or otherwise. Intel's patches just plain kill performance, putting single thread i7 performance well behind Ryzen. So much for the last remaining thing Intel had to crow about. It's a Ryzen world today, I heard it's already north of 30% of new desktop parts and still climbing. If TSMC 7nm plays out without production glitches, Ryzen will take the lead on desktop this spring and keep it for the foreseeable future. AMD is not ramping up their laptop effort, with a highly credible low power GPU heavy lineup. And Epyc is reportedly already up to 5% of server shipments, with 64 core (128 threads!) chips now rumored to be in the pipeline.
Well, drifted off a bit there. The point is, just don't waste your money on Intel desktop or server parts, Meltdown is a complete disaster.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The motherboard whose box is the most sturdy, will offer an excellent support when standing over it.