All Time Best Motherboard ?

My fav is def NF7-S V2, but the Abit 440BX wth the cely was great also.

RIP Abit, we will always miss you.
 
I cannot remember my best slot 1 board, but I do remember my fav socket 370.

Asus CUSL2-C..This is the board I first used water for cooling. Some good memories :)
 
No,no,no NO !

The striker extreme belongs in the "Worst-mobo-ever" category , not the best.

What a POS

:rolleyes:

It's not the worst, but it was bad.

It's exceptionally hard for me to choose the all time best motherboard. I've worked with so many awesome boards over the years. However, the one that makes me probably the most nostalgic is the Intel PR440FX. I'd like to say the ABIT BX6 Revision 2, but I had fan headers burn out on that one, so it's out. I'd have loved to include the ABIT BP6 but frankly I didn't own it very long due to the sockets being essentially Celeron compatible only. The ASUS P4C800 Deluxe was really good to me. I also liked the ASUS P2L97. So I'm going to go with my top five. (No EPoX piece of shit, or quirky DFI remotely makes the list.)

Top Five Motherboards of All Time:
  • Intel PR440FX
  • ASUS P2L97
  • ASUS A7V-133
  • ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
  • ASUS Rampage III Black Edition
Honorable Mentions:
  • ABIT AA8XE
  • ASUS Commando
The only reason the ASUS Commando doesn't make my top five list is because it wasn't personally owned by me. However it was the BEST P965 Express chipset board I ever worked with.

Just for fun, I thought I'd include the worst of the worst.

The Top Five Worst Motherboards of All Time:
  • FIC VA503+
  • Soyo SY-6BA+III
  • DFI UT nF4 SLI-DR Expert
  • EVGA 680i SLI (All part numbers)
  • ASUS Striker Extreme
The FIC VA503+ was a huge piece of shit. The diagrams on the motherboard were wrong, the manual was wrong, and the adendum in the manual which included updated jumper diagrams were wrong. It also had a high failure rate. In short it was garbage. The Soyo SY-6BA+III was a board that was bought by someone I worked with to have 4 identical machines for the company built. I built them all. Within a year 3 out of 4 boards had died. The remaining good board had a dead PCI slot. One of the four had missing locking tabs on it's DIMM slots. These were all total shit. The DFI board I expect to take some flak on. Everyone kept saying it was a "tweakers board" that had to be tweaked to be stable. That just means it was a piece of shit with poor QVL testing and because they overclocked well people made excuses for it. If it isn't good at stock settings with some of the most common hardware around it's shit. And QC was hit and miss on them as it took three of them to find one good one for a system build I worked on for someone else. Funny how the third one worked and the other two didn't all with the same hardware and at stock settings. The 680i SLI fiasco was bad. Both reference and non-reference boards alike had poor voltage regulation and high failure rates. It would fry your RAM when it wanted to and take USB inputs only when it felt like it. Absolute trash.
 
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Refreshing my list I posted earlier.

Asus:
RIIE, RIIIE/MF
Strike II Extreme
P5N-T Deluxe
CUSL/TUSL
P4P800C/P and Deluxe
A8N-E SLi
Crosshair

Gigabyte:
G31M-ES2L
X48-DQ6
X38-UD5P or w/e

DFI:
LanParty Jnr

EVGA:
790i Ultra

MSI:
7533

Worst Mobos of all Time:
All the Gigabyte X58 mobo's except the G1 range
EVGA 680i/780i range
and few oldschool Epox POS I have lying around somewhere.
 
abit bp6 and ip35pro for me.

btw, what happened to abit? i've been out of the loop since 2007ish.
 
I think the DFI p45-ion-t2a2 was a notably exceptional motherboard.Any computer geek would love too have that one.
 
abit bp6 and ip35pro for me.

btw, what happened to abit? i've been out of the loop since 2007ish.

ABIT was bought by another company and became Universal abit. They basically made worse and worse motherboards until pulling out of the motherboard market entirely. Then they ended up going under completely. Their engineers ended up at other companies.
 
The last Abit board I had was the IN9 32x-max... seemed like a good board but the digital pwm would make noise (quite a bit) under high cpu load and it bugged me... tried two boards and two psus and had the same result. Oh well.. I loved my older abit boards... and I just found the manual for my BH-6 yesterday while going through a pile of old pc stuff. funny!
 
MSI P6N-SLI

Longest i've ever owned a motherboard. Kept my e6300 @ 3.3 ghz for a long time. Solid as a rock.

10dxx8j.jpg
 
DFI NF4 Lan Party Ultra-D is mine. It was just so beast. Always used to lust over the Abit IC7 Max 3 too. Who could forget the Asus P5A? Asus CUSL-2 with a P3 700mhz (coppermine) that I worked all summer to get. Damn, this thread is a throwback. It kinda makes me sad.
 
for sure all those lanparty NF4 boards were epic. Definitely some of my favorite watercooling and ocing memories were working with my SLI-D and the expert that replaced it.
 
for sure all those lanparty NF4 boards were epic. Definitely some of my favorite watercooling and ocing memories were working with my SLI-D and the expert that replaced it.

I'm going against the grain here. Those DFI boards were pretty much all pieces of shit.
 
lol... well, they were pretty finicky... I guess it's safe to say they were popular in their time. ;)
 
No nForce chipset can be on the 'greatest' list. Those things were filled with a ton of bugs throughout their entire lifespan. People (and me) only bought them so we could do SLI. Other then that, they were complete shit.

nForce 2 series were great boards pre PCIe anyway, I'm sure the single slots were just fine...SLi was in it's infancy as well, it still has problems now.
 
Abit BP-6

Thats probably my favorite motherboard for its time. I also got the first geforce to go with it. Quake II became a whole new game with opengl.

A close second for me is the M2N32-SLi, I got it in 2006 and didn't replace it til early 2011. Probably the longest I've used a motherboard ever.

I also had an Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI that motherboard was badass but I didn't last long got fried from a lightning strike.
 
Best for me that I've owned:

Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI
(first SLI board I owned and was stable as a rock in dried concrete)

Biostar T-Force TF570SLI
(still running in my main system, albeit not for long when I finish my 1155 upgrade)

ECS D6VAA
(just retired it in full working order about 2 months ago; running dual PIII-1000's)


The worst:
Biostar M5-ATA
Soyo SY-5EMA+
 
Gigabyte GA-K8NS-Pro - Very very fond memories of that motherboard. Can't say I've had another board before or since that has been as rock solid stable or versatile for its time.

It restored my faith in the AMD platform at the time also, having gone from Irongate ->Tyan Thunder K7 -> GA-K8NS-Pro, I completely avoided a whole lot of crappy VIA chipset issues without reverting back to Intel.

The irony is how far AMD has fallen since the K7..
 
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For me, the best mainboards I had...

- Epox 8K3A+ (Socket 462, KT333 chipset) --> It was the first mainboard doing more than 400mhz FSB for athlon XP. I had some fun with it and my first Barton 2800+, which OCed to 3.2Ghz under water.

- DFI NF4 LanParty SLI-DR --> It killed my Geil Ultra-X BH5's at 4.0v with insane speeds and latencies (1,5-2-2-5...) . I burnt some modules with my mobo to get new RMA'ed ones :D:D

Newer mobos are better, but OC was very funny 6-8 years ago :D

Regards
 
Showing my age here. Top 5 of all time?

1) Asus P2B - Overclocking P2's with jumpers!
2) Abit VP6 - Dual P3 CPU's, Highpoint IDE RAID goodness
3) Abit TH7II-RAID - Fast board (silly Rambus) that beat DDR boards for years.
4) Evga X58 SLI - Longest owned board. Bought with a 920 on day one and it ran flawless for years.
5) Abit AA8XE - 4.0GHz on a P4 Presscott!

The Asus CUSL2 almost made the list.
 
I miss Soyo, Epox, and Abit :(

My Abit BP6 was so sick. the Asus A7N8X was a nice one too....
 
Another vote for the A7N8X-Deluxe.

Abit BP-6 was nice as well.

P4P800-Deluxe was rock solid back in the day too.

+1 on the P4P800, that was my first self-built pc with a P4 3.2GHz northwood and 1 gig of ram, with a 6800gt and that computer is still going strong at my dads. :cool:
 
I miss Soyo, Epox, and Abit :(

My Abit BP6 was so sick. the Asus A7N8X was a nice one too....

I miss the old ABIT. I can't say I miss EPoX or Soyo. Everything I saw from them was pretty much shit.
 
The G31M-ES2L was already mentioned, but I have to say, that was the best value in MOBOs I have ever seen. You could get them for about 50-60 bucks, stick a e5200 or e7500 and overclock like a bandit! That was some serious performance for cheap and I built several for family and friends and they are still going strong. For the dollar I dont think you could get more performance.
 
Well, I'll add my 2¢ to a very derailed thread due to the OP wording it wrong.

My favorites;
Asus P3B-F
Asus CUSL2-C

Showing my age;
Tyan 1573
Tyan 1830 (AT Board. Great even with the USB power issue.)
Tyan 1854 Had both Socket 1 and Socket 370. One of the first to support 512M sticks.
Abit BP6

Standouts;
Abit NF7-S
Abit IC-7

Epox 8K3A+ My first foray into the "alternative" brands
ECS made some nice boards
 
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My ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe was phenomenal. Kept an Athlon XP 2800+ running OC'd for 7 years, ran stock for 2 years after that and still kickin'. Survived 3 blown PSU's too.
 
My favorite all time board is the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. Nothing I have owned prior or since has come close to the stability and OC-ability that this board has provided me. I have been using one since 2008 and it has kept my E8400 at 4.0GHz (500x8) for 24-7 everyday use with nominal voltage, and will do 4.4GHz with more voltage. I have run it Prime stable with a FSB of 530 (stock is 333) and it will not quit. I paid about $110 shipped for it from Newegg.

I also like the Asus Sabertooth P67 board quite a bit. I've been using one in a workstation for the last year or more and it has been flawless as well with my 2600K at 4.8GHz regular usage (5.1GHz max).

The DFI NF3 UT 250GB is another nice board which will do very high FSB without issue and drives my OCZ PC3700EB memory very nicely. Sadly, mine is starting to get a little flaky of late and doesn't get much use.

I still have an Asus A7N8X-Dlx Rev.2 board that works fine, but was always a dog at OCing. Another very reliable board from almost 9 years ago.
 
This is the best board ever made as far as enthusiasts goes. The SR3 is the LGA2011 successor to that board (not released yet).

For single CPU, I would have to say the Rampage IV Extreme.

Llama[Style];1038336290 said:
Yep. Sr3 (srx) when it comes out. Sr2 is the only other option.

wow.. had a sweet deal on the sr-2 board and returned it based on comments others posted in a different thread. That and the cost of CPU's per socket. Every time I see the board i drool. The things i could run on that board and it would turn around and say.. is that all you got?
 
Another vote for the GA-EP45-UD3P. I've had two of these (v1.1 and v1.3) and they've both been awesome. Best board that I've ever owned.

Before that I'd have to say my Abit NF7-S v2.0. nForce2 with Soundstorm, SATA, dual channel DDR-400 and Firewire. That with a 2400+ XP-M Barton was really something back in the day.
 
ASUS P2B sporting a slotket. I still have two.
They are my window to the past (pun intended) running DOS/Win31/Win98.
 
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