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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.
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).
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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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.
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.
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.
So, the OP has a 5 year old LGA1150 Z87 MB, and is looking for ongoing BIOS updates. A quick Google shows a MSI Z87-G45 from that timeframe.
Latest BIOS update? 2014-07-22. Want to take another try at being responsive?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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. . . .
Wait what? You literally cannot sign away your legal warranty rights under the legislation that is compatible with the relevant EU directive, and Sweden must harmonise national law with this EU directive.
They are however well within their rights to demand you pay them for the check-up if they find that you're at fault (i.e. you dropped the damn thing into a pool and decided to pretend this is a warranty repair).
Z170 / Skylake 6xxx is the oldest that will get the Meltdown updated BIOS. This is Intel making that call. Z97 and older are SOL.