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Ask Slashdot: Which Motherboard Manufacturer Provides the Best Support?

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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?

11 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. SuperMicro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Their support is so great, it's almost like they're watching what you're doing.

  2. Spectre and Meltdown by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Spectre and Meltdown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Spectre and Meltdown by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's not a BIOS update, it's a PURCHASE update. Buy AMD.

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    3. Re:Spectre and Meltdown by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re: Spectre and Meltdown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Drink beer!
      1/9 supreme court judges thinks that beer is great.

  3. Mitigations will be in the OSes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  4. Asus, Gigabyte or MSI by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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  5. Bad time to say it, but they do support, update by raymorris · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Break out the lab equipment by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... 5 year old motherboard ...

    Good luck. In the land of consumer electronics, things that old need to be carbon dated.

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  7. Re:MSI by Woldscum · · Score: 3, Informative

    Z170 / Skylake 6xxx is the oldest that will get the Meltdown updated BIOS. This is Intel making that call. Z97 and older are SOL.