The Top 5 Best Motherboards of All Time

Dan_D

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After the positive responses I received for The Top 5 Worst Motherboards of All Time article and by popular demand, I decided to create a list for the the best motherboards. Unlike the worst boards which were picked for obvious reasons, I it was important to qualify exactly how I chose the best motherboards on this list.

The best is subjective by itself but I think the best motherboards stand out in a particular way. It's really not hard for a company to build a long lasting and stable motherboard. There are plenty of motherboards that last well past their useful operational life span. Some motherboards went above and beyond by being high quality and standing the test of the time or by being relevant for an unusually long period of time. Examples of that might be motherboards based on the excessively long lived 440BX chipset which remained relevant long after successor chipsets were released. Another category that will help a motherboard make this list is innovation. Some motherboards had something special about their design which made them more memorable, interesting, desirable, influential and ultimately a favorite among enthusiasts. These are the criteria I will use to separate run of the mill excellence from what I consider some of history's best motherboards.

#5 - Intel PR440FX "Providence" (Socket 8, Pentium Pro) -1996

This is one motherboard many of you have probably never heard of. It was a dual socket 8 motherboard designed to work with Intel's mighty Pentium Pro processors. Back in those days dual processor x86 or "WinTel" motherboards as they were often called were rare at the time. Relative to today's money, the Pentium Pro was as expensive as Intel's ludicrous $2,000 CPUs if not more. Yet, there was still a market for the types of performance builds that Alienware and other boutique builders cut their teeth on and made names for themselves.

The PR440FX Providence, was an early ATX motherboard and it was a board many mom and pop builders used as the basis for the ultimate gaming rigs of the day. Paired with a powerful video card, this dual socket monster allowed you to build the fastest possible configuration for games like Doom and Quake. That's precisely what I did. This motherboard was a bit of an odd ball as it required the use of 5.0v EDO DIMMs, but most importantly it allowed for the use of dual Pentium Pro CPU's. I bought a pair of Pentium Pro 180MHz CPUs and overclocked them to 200MHz. This motherboard is 21 years old and mine still works to this day. That's longevity and the reason why this beast is not only still in my personal collection, but #5 on my list. It would rank higher for me if it didn't use the bizarre 5v EDO DIMMs which were a pain in the ass to find and very expensive at the time.

#4 - EVGA Super Record 2 (SR-2) (Dual LGA 1366 / Xeon 5500 / 5600 series) - 2011

This motherboard had to make the list for two reasons. The first is my affinity for multi-processor socket motherboards. The second is that this motherboard was innovative. It was a gaming board designed to use Xeon CPUs, it was capable of overclocking thanks to it's beefy 8-phase digital PWM's. It also had 12 DIMM slots and supported 4-Way SLI. This monster HPTX motherboard was special because it was a no-holds barred deisgn that took things to the next level. Intel tried to do something similar with it's D5400XS motherboard but didn't quite get it right by hampering it with the FB-DIMM requirement. EVGA made no such mistakes. This motherboard was not only the envy of anyone who couldn't afford it, but it was reliable. People who used these did so for a very long time. They even commanded a high price on the used market, long after other motherboards would be relegated to garage sale pricing. I've never been a huge fan of EVGA motherboards, but this one was truly special.

#3 - ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe Mini-ITX (LGA 1155 / Core i5/i7 3xxx series) - 2012

This motherboard makes the list by being the first serious, enthusiast class motherboard in the mini-ITX form factor. Prior to the P8Z77-I Deluxe's launch, every mITX motherboard I saw compromised on voltage hardware and overclocking capability. This motherboard didn't bother compromising just to stay within the form factor's specs. ASUS truly innovated here with a daughter board that held the very beefy voltage hardware. According to ASUS, the P8Z77-I Deluxe had the strongest overclocking potential in it's product line at the time of release. This motherboard not only proved itself during our review, but it continued to prove itself until last year when I finally retired this from one of my own systems. This motherboard paved the way for several successors and set the bar for what an enthusiast motherboard in the mini-ITX form factor should be for years to come.

#2 - ABIT BX6 Rev 2.0 (Slot 1, Pentium II/III) - 1999

This list wouldn't be complete without one of ABIT's finest creations on it. It's also natural to choose a board that used Intel's venerable i440BX chipset which was both ahead of its time and unusually long lived. ABIT's BX6 Rev 2.0 was an improved BX6 which was already an excellent motherboard. While this was not the originator of the jumperless motherboard design we take for granted today, it was an improvement that added dividers which allowed us to keep the PCI bus close to stock and get more from our CPU's. The motherboard had numerous improvements over it's descendants and through the use of Slotket adapters it remained relevant for a very long time. It wasn't the first i440BX motherboard from ABIT, but it was certainly the best in my opinion.

#1 - ASUS Rampage III Black Edition (LGA 1366 / Core i7 9xx series) - 2011

Simply put, this was the best X58 motherboard ever built. Scratch that, it's one of the best motherboards ever built. Nothing else came close to this motherboard in its era. The X58 chipset was long lived and remained relevant for a very long time. It's still relevant today as we've seen, Sandy Bridge still holds its own in gaming today. By 2011, I'd already seen more motherboards than I can possibly remember. It takes a lot to blow me away, and that's just what this one did. I already had reviewed and owned the previous Rampage III Extreme, which was fantastic. I initially expected a recoloring and slight tweak to that design. Boy was I wrong. When I opened the Rampage III Black Edition box, I had felt a sense of awe that you typically only see in children experiencing new things for the first time. It was one of the few motherboards I've seen that practically threw the idea of cost control out the window. At the time it was the most expensive single processor socket motherboard I'd ever seen.

I reviewed this motherboard back in 2011 and I was blown away by it's quality, feature set and included accessories. This one even came with it's own premium, non-proprietary sound card and Killer NIC which I used long after I replaced the motherboard itself. This motherboard was released near the end of the X58's life cycle so it comes as no surprise that it was the best X58 motherboard ever created. It should be as it was one of the last X58 motherboards to be designed and built. Even back then, many motherboard manufacturers claimed to build motherboards for gaming, but this is the first one I really felt lived up to that claim. It was the best way to overclock Intel's first hex core processor and one of their most successful Extreme Edition CPU's to date. The mighty Core i7 980X processor was special and deserved a worthy platform. At the time, I never found anything better than ASUS' Rampage III Black Edition. It's still capable gaming platform today even though it launched six years ago. This one is still in my collection and it still works to this day. I ran this board for quite some time and it's never given me any problems. I've never experienced a crash, hard lock or any other issue I can recall. It still sees use as a server in my home to this day.

Honorable Mention - Intel D5400XS "Skulltrail" (Dual LGA 771, Core 2 Extreme QX9775)

This is here for several reasons. It almost made my list, but I kept it out of the top 5 for two reasons. 1.) It was restricted to using slower FB-DIMMs instead of DDR3. 2.) It was somewhat quirky over the long haul. Things like 3-Way SLI support and some issues I had with ATI's Radeon 4970X2's were why I disqualified it. It gets an honorable mention though for being innovative. It brought us 8 cores in a gaming friendly package. It was the first non-NVIDIA chipset based board to support SLI. Though it did use a couple of NF100 bridge chips which provided the "key" to NVIDIA's SLI function. There was no software involved and those chips worked well enough. Personally, this monster served me from December 2007 until sometime in 2011 when I went to an LGA 1366 setup. It was my longest lived motherboard and processor combo to date, and it got me away from using those god awful EVGA 680i SLI motherboards that made the #1 spot in the worst motherboards of all time list.


Dan's Thoughts


Let me just start my closing thoughts by stating that this was incredibly difficult to write. There are a lot of awesome motherboards out there that could have made this list. There are a lot of bullet proof motherboards that lived very long lives, particular innovative designs and robust features. There are even a lot of motherboards that I put on this list and took off several times while writing it. Motherboards like the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe, A8N-SLI Deluxe, MSI's Big Bang XPOWER II, Tyan K8WE (S2895), ABIT's IC7 MAX3, BH6, and Intel's D5400XS were all good examples of motherboards that could easily have made the cut. These were all disqualified due to one or two quirks I've experienced with them or they had a design aspect I didn't particularly like. As examples: Intel's D5400XS used FB-DIMMs, the P4C800 Deluxe had a short market life span, and the Big Bang XPOWER II had a couple of BIOS quirks.

I really had to nit pick to narrow the list down to just five. With the exception of the EVGA SR-2, the boards chosen were all owned by me personally, and ran for years of hard use without any issues that I can recall. The EVGA SR-2 made the list because I always wanted one and because of their innovative nature. I did work on a couple systems that had them installed and found them a joy to work with, and they enjoyed a great deal of popularity among our forum members and readers that had deep pockets. For these reasons, it made the cut.

Similarly, no AMD processor compatible motherboards made this list because all of them I've used over the years had one or two quirks even if they were only minor. There were many contenders on the AMD side but ultimately, I felt the boards I chose were a bit better. For example, the A7V-133 was awesome, but it wasn't particularly innovative. It just worked. Even ASRock had some considerations here as I enjoyed the X99/ITX-ac and the X99-WS very much. In the end, the heat sink mounting holes on the mini-ITX board and the fact that the X99-WS wouldn't run at stock settings disqualified them.

You may also note that there aren't any newer motherboards on the list. This doesn't mean that newer motherboards shouldn't be on the list, but I've not found any that were truly special in recent years. ASUS' Rampage IV Black Edition came to mind, but the R3BE stands above it for being more innovative at the time and for being older, and thus having lasted longer. There are other good ones like MSI's excellent X99A GODLIKE and GIGABYTE's Z170X Gaming G1 which are nothing short of the best pieces of hardware of their era, but weren't necessarily innovative as much as they were stuffed with expensive features that seemed out of place with their target market. The X99A GODLIKE almost made the cut, but again I was nitpicking and took it off the list.

I'm sure there will be plenty of discussion on this topic, perhaps more than there was about the bad boards which most of us can agree were bad.
 
Good you decided to remove the a8n sli deluxe if anythimg because of its 20'000rpm chipset fan that would burn itself out after aweek and would need a crazy number of same replacements or an aftermarket one.

The a8n sli premium was the better of the two, no dumb card to flip over and insert into the mobo if you wanted to use sli or not, heatpipe cooling solution and more.

in general the premium was the board the deluxe should of been.

better still the a8n32 sli deluxe, anyone of those two boards would be more deserving than the deluxe on the asus side, but I am glad the deluxe wasnt on your list.

Btw, intel biased me thinks.
 
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How about the Abit BP6? That unmodified dual Celeron support was pretty sweet :)

It was considered. I dropped it from the list because the VRM design wasn't forward thinking, which limited the motherboard's life span as it was incompatible with Tualatin processors.

Good you decided to remove the a8n sli deluxe if anythimg because of its 20'000rpm chipset fan that would burn itself out after aweek and would need a crazy number of same replacements or an aftermarket one.

The a8n sli premium was the better of the two, no dumb card to flip over and insert into the mobo if you wanted to use sli or not, heatpipe cooling solution and more.

in general the premium was the board the deluxe should of been.

better still the a8n32 sli deluxe, anyone of those two boards would be more deserving than the deluxe on the asus side, but I am glad the deluxe wasnt on your list.

Btw, intel biased me thinks.

I might have been thinking of the later A8N-SLI Premium or the A8N32 SLI Deluxe originally. In any case, I pulled the A8N-SLI Deluxe from the list because of the chipset fan and the manual PCI-Express switch. Lastly, I mentioned exactly why there is "Intel bias" in the post. There were a lot of good AMD processor compatible motherboards, but few that I'd consider good enough to make this list.
 
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Lol, so it wasnt just my fans that spun at 20k rpm, I was begining to suspect i was being sabotaged with all the 20k replacements that I received.

To be honest, I dont blame ya for the lack of amd boards as the good boards that come to my mind are all intel aswell, go figure.
 
Lol, so it wasnt just my fans that spun at 20k rpm, I was begining to suspect i was being sabotaged with all the 20k replacements that I received.

To be honest, I dont blame ya for the lack of amd boards as the good boards that come to my mind are all intel aswell, go figure.

Like I said, there were a few that I could have considered. ASUS' A7V-133 was fucking excellent. It's one of the best I've ever used. It wasn't particularly innovative. It just worked. The Tyan Thunder K8WE (S2895) was awesome as well, but it did have a few firmware quirks which kept me from using it. I believe the A8N-E was really good if memory serves, albeit basic. I remember building a few systems for people using it and it was great.
 
I had the Asus A7V133, A7V333 and A8NSLI Premium. I still have them now, in fact, and almost a year ago re-loaded operating systems on all of them just to see how they worked (and if they still worked).
The '133 got Windows XP because WIndows 7/10 would not install, the '333 got Windows 7 32bit and the A8N got Windows 10 32bit. (For some reason Windows 10 64bit hung during install.)

If my memory serves from back in the day when these boards were my main systems:
The A7V133 was a good board, decently stable and reliable for gaming. The Thunderbird 1.2GHz CPU was a monster at the time and is what switched me to AMD for this and the next 2 generations of my home-built systems. Later on in life spent a lot of time on grid.org computing protein configurations until grid.org shut down in 2007.
The A7V333 was slightly less stable and was, unfortunately, made during the "bad cap" era, so when I was resurrecting these systems some of its capacitors had to be replaced. But it still works. It has the 1733MHz 2100+ CPU. I remember it being slightly anti-climactic after I upgraded from the Thunderbird to the Athlon XP 2100+. I was expecting more than I got.
The A8NSLI Premium was an OK board, but not without some issues, mostly NForce chipset and driver-related if I am remembering correctly. It has the Athlon FX57 2.8GHz. It was definitely nice and fast, but I wish it was the dual-core FX60 now.
 
Pretty much all nForce boards had one issue or another, often relating to their drivers. I consider the nForce boards to be the best option for AMD CPU's back in the day and therefore none of them were good enough to make my list. There could also be some great AM3 / AM3+ motherboards but I didn't use enough of them to form an opinion beyond the early crop of them I reviewed which were all pretty much shit.
 
I had the Asus A7V133, A7V333 and A8NSLI Premium. I still have them now, in fact, and almost a year ago re-loaded operating systems on all of them just to see how they worked (and if they still worked).
The '133 got Windows XP because WIndows 7/10 would not install, the '333 got Windows 7 32bit and the A8N got Windows 10 32bit. (For some reason Windows 10 64bit hung during install.)

If my memory serves from back in the day when these boards were my main systems:
The A7V133 was a good board, decently stable and reliable for gaming. The Thunderbird 1.2GHz CPU was a monster at the time and is what switched me to AMD for this and the next 2 generations of my home-built systems. Later on in life spent a lot of time on grid.org computing protein configurations until grid.org shut down in 2007.
The A7V333 was slightly less stable and was, unfortunately, made during the "bad cap" era, so when I was resurrecting these systems some of its capacitors had to be replaced. But it still works. It has the 1733MHz 2100+ CPU. I remember it being slightly anti-climactic after I upgraded from the Thunderbird to the Athlon XP 2100+. I was expecting more than I got.
The A8NSLI Premium was an OK board, but not without some issues, mostly NForce chipset and driver-related if I am remembering correctly. It has the Athlon FX57 2.8GHz. It was definitely nice and fast, but I wish it was the dual-core FX60 now.

Phew, brings back some memories.

My amd 939 nforce4 lineup was like this, x2 3800 rig, x2 4400 rig, x2 4800 rig and then finally a fx60 rig all at the same time, I just needed a x2 4600 and i would of completed the lineup.

Sold the entire lot along with sli video cards, a8n sli deluxe and two a8n32 deluxes, shit load of memory and god knows whatever else in 2009/10 for wait for it.......

A grand total of £110

I regret it now as I wasnt selling because I needed the money, I did it because I needed to get rid of shit to make room for new stuff.

All of them suffered problems to one degree or another because of the quirky nf4 chipset, but problems that were a common occurence to anyone who was into computers back then, nothing major, alot of it was software problems caused by nvidia.
 
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I've got several of the best mobos on my list, but the 3 that stand out as being THE best for me are:

MSI KD7 Master L- This was my very first at dual CPU and was just building a Folding farm. I had 2 green ones and a the red one and they were all rock steady stable. Not 1 single issue with them ever. I had a pair of bartons in the red one and cooled with a pair of DTek waterblocks. Man I always loved that board!

Epox 8K7A+ - This sucker was one of my favorites during the socket A days. Alot were plagued with capacitor problems, but the ones I had were rock steady stable right up until retirement.

Asus P4C800-E Deluxe - This sucker, with voltage mods was able to take my Prescott past the 4.5Ghz barrier with a Prometeia Mach II GT. I think I may still have pictures :D

Those were the golden years for me. Fun times, fun times.

Found them-
 

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You claim the SR-2 was "reliable", but many SR-2's had issues with the RAM slots and RAM dimms disappearing on boot and reappearing after a reboot. (Quite a few of us [H]orde folders had this happen.)
Otherwise it was a great board once you found and modded a case large enough to fit one. :) (I used a LL PC-A71F as did a few others when they were on clearance at Microcenter for $150.)
 
You claim the SR-2 was "reliable", but many SR-2's had issues with the RAM slots and RAM dimms disappearing on boot and reappearing after a reboot. (Quite a few of us [H]orde folders had this happen.)

It was mostly added for being innovative, but all the ones I worked with were fine. That said, I'm sure you can find examples of any of the boards on my list that weren't great. These were boards that worked well for me. Granted, the SR-2 is the only one in the list I didn't own myself. I knew a couple of people that had them however. I worked on their systems and never experienced those issues.
 
You claim the SR-2 was "reliable", but many SR-2's had issues with the RAM slots and RAM dimms disappearing on boot and reappearing after a reboot. (Quite a few of us [H]orde folders had this happen.)
Otherwise it was a great board once you found and modded a case large enough to fit one. :) (I used a LL PC-A71F as did a few others when they were on clearance at Microcenter for $150.)

i had this issue when i first got it. turned out it was some BIOS auto voltages were set too low (VTT) or too high ( vDIMM) for 48GB of RAM.
It packs a whooping lot of punch with 12 cores, 24 threads and quad-SLI. Thanks to the SR-2 we had gigantic gaming cases on the market, like the Rosewill Black Hawk Ultra, which i used to build a water-cooled quad opteron server later on.

To have an idea of how awesome the SR-2 is, imagine two Rampage III Black Edition inside one PC case, running overclocked Xeons with ECC memory.
Dan, you totally missed this glory!

Based on what i am reading about the newer 14nm CPUs generation, i believe the SR2 will remain my main rig until 7nm CPUs arrive.
 
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I seriously want a Threadripper solely because its shape reminds me of my old Pentium Pro. Ridiculous giant rectangle CPUs ftw

Thank you for the article BTW. Nice trip down memory lane
 
I normally am not a fan of best of / worst of lists, but I've enjoyed these trips down memory lane, Dan. Thanks!
 
I've got several of the best mobos on my list, but the 3 that stand out as being THE best for me are:

MSI KD7 Master L- This was my very first at dual CPU and was just building a Folding farm. I had 2 green ones and a the red one and they were all rock steady stable. Not 1 single issue with them ever. I had a pair of bartons in the red one and cooled with a pair of DTek waterblocks. Man I always loved that board!

Epox 8K7A+ - This sucker was one of my favorites during the socket A days. Alot were plagued with capacitor problems, but the ones I had were rock steady stable right up until retirement.

Asus P4C800-E Deluxe - This sucker, with voltage mods was able to take my Prescott past the 4.5Ghz barrier with a Prometeia Mach II GT. I think I may still have pictures :D

Those were the golden years for me. Fun times, fun times.

Found them-

I had a lot of issues with EPoX motherboards. They also had stupid model numbers. Bad capacitors were a thing on EPoX motherboards long after the rest of the industry got it's shit together. Well, Apple was just as bad. The ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe was awesome and had it enjoyed a longer span on the market, I'd have chosen it. The previous P4C800 Deluxe was nearly the same board and just as good. I ran one myself for a long time. It was around longer, but again it was replaced by the "E" model a short time later. BIOS issues kept me from choosing the MSI KD7 Master-L but I did think about it.
 
I had an A7V 133 followed by a P4P800 delux. The experiences with those two were so overwhelmingly positive I've almost exclusively owned Asus boards since and am rarely let down. Note to the manufacturers: consistently releasing a solid product can earn you customers for life.
 
What no mention of the dawn of the overclocker boards, the socket 7 Asus P55T2P4?

AT form factor, EDO simms, front side bus speed overclocking for locked cpu's.
 
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I too am surprised that the Abit BP6 didn't make the list. I had two of those motherboards, then replaced them with the VP6. Given what I've read on [H], I would have thought that the Asrock X99 ITX board would also be on the list.

What no mention of the dawn of the overclocker boards, the socket 7 Asus P55T2P4?

Overclocking goes back a wee bit further than that.
 
...there is one undeniable entry...no matter where it is in the top 5 , it IS in the top 5, That would be any Abit with the BX440 chipset

I had a BX6 but I don't know where it got off to , but here is my BE6 that is still in play today. This thing OC'd to 933 mhz at one time , not sure where it is right now , the BX440 set had hella OC's on the 700 and 800 flip chips.

Abit BE6 i440BX , PIII 700 flip chip on Abit Slotket slot 1 adapter, Voodoo 3 3500TV , I forget the mem , creative sound

IMG_5187.jpg
 
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I too am surprised that the Abit BP6 didn't make the list. I had two of those motherboards, then replaced them with the VP6. Given what I've read on [H], I would have thought that the Asrock X99 ITX board would also be on the list.



Overclocking goes back a wee bit further than that.

Like I said, the BP6 only got cut because of the VRM design. I had one myself and I enjoyed it. The X99 ITX/ac only got cut because of the heat sink compatibility issues.
 
How about the Abit BP6? That unmodified dual Celeron support was pretty sweet :)

I actually wanted to know why the BP6 was not in the worst MoBos of all time list.... At best it was a fun experiment.

My current MSI P55-GD65 rocks!
 
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Pretty much all nForce boards had one issue or another, often relating to their drivers. I consider the nForce boards to be the best option for AMD CPU's back in the day and therefore none of them were good enough to make my list. There could also be some great AM3 / AM3+ motherboards but I didn't use enough of them to form an opinion beyond the early crop of them I reviewed which were all pretty much shit.

My Abit NF7-s was a great motherboard. The community support was enthusiastic and long-lived. I still miss Abit pushing Asus and other motherboard makers.

EDIT: Yes, mine was a v2 also.
 
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I remember working on my buddy's Rampage III. Solid board, miles ahead of the EVGA X58 Classified at the time.
 
10+ motherboards were equally as good as this countdown but very interesting to see what you chose Dan :)

a bit of a break from the 'usual' top 1-20 everything.

myself i would have included some tulatin, some abit, some df7, and gigabye dq6 XD

great article!!!
 
10+ motherboards were equally as good as this countdown but very interesting to see what you chose Dan :)

a bit of a break from the 'usual' top 1-20 everything.

myself i would have included some tulatin, some abit, some df7, and gigabye dq6 XD

great article!!!

Absolutely. It was very difficult to choose only 5 to include here. I could have broken it out in dual socket, AMD, Intel, by era, etc. but then this would have taken a lot longer to write. :)
 
Very nice article and insight into your mind.

Feel free to whip up some more of these top 5's and bottom 5's in small modular articles so you don't have to stare at the screen too long!
 
I would still be buying Abit boards if they were still around. Really loved the IC7-Max3.
I still have an iP35-Pro with a Q6600 and some DDR2-1066 Corsair Dominator RAM from that time. The BE6-II rev 2.0 was my first taste of 1.0+GHz as I had a golden 700e that would hold 166fsb. I used nothing but Abit and shed manly tears when they closed shop.
 
I still have an iP35-Pro with a Q6600 and some DDR2-1066 Corsair Dominator RAM from that time. The BE6-II rev 2.0 was my first taste of 1.0+GHz as I had a golden 700e that would hold 166fsb. I used nothing but Abit and shed manly tears when they closed shop.

That the one with the pink BIOS?
 
That the one with the pink BIOS?

I don't think so. I believe it used Abit's Soft Menu II that looked fairly normal. As far as I can remember without consulting Google, the only difference was the BE6 had RAID and the BX6 did not.
 
I don't think so. I believe it used Abit's Soft Menu II that looked fairly normal. As far as I can remember without consulting Google, the only difference was the BE6 had RAID and the BX6 did not.

One of the last ABIT boards I looked at when they had been just renamed "abit" had a pink Award BIOS. It was strange and I couldn't see any reason for it. I thought it was the IP35 Pro, but that was a very long time ago. Whatever the board was with the pink BIOS was a subpar offering.
 
oh glorious SR-2, the last motherboard without compromises. There were no benchmarks, single-threaded or otherwise, that it was noticeably worse than an overclocked 980x on a top-of-the-line X58 board on, and on tasks that took advantage of the 24 threads, nothing came close. And it wasn't that expensive, either - a pair of 4.2GHz-capable Xeons, a board, and 24GB of RAM cost under $3k, which is practically cheap in today's world of $10k Xeon Platinums and $2k Core i9's.
a pity Intel has locked down BCLK overclocking on Xeons so hard since then, but who knows, with Skylake's decoupled clock tree we may yet see a worthy successor.
 
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