The Top 5 Best Motherboards of All Time

I nominate the Rampage III Gene. Socket 1366 goodness in a mATX format: just enough room for SLi and a sound card if you want it. It was my perfect motherboard.

I remembering reviewing that one way back in the day. It was an excellent motherboard at a pretty good price point if I recall correctly. The only reason I didn't rank that higher is because it's not my favorite form factor.
 
My top 3 motherboards: (only three because I could almost list all MBs I owned if I'd do a top 5)


3. ASUS Cusl2-C - This was my first board that felt like an actual quality product, it just was well put together, and always rock solid, everything that came before and after had some quirks or had issues with windows drivers. Not with this one. Trouble free while it was with me, and I used multiple CPU GPU and memory configurations with it. At least three of each.

2. ECS K7S5A - What this cheapo crap? Yes, it had insane value it meant I could get into the 64bit AMD business at a very low price point even affordable to a high school kid. It even was capable of some limited overclocking.

1. Abit BH6 (the successor of the BX6) - the greatest value board I've ever had, and with PPGA and later FCPGA adapter cards it lasted 3 gens of CPUz. Plus I've achieved with it my overclocking record that still stands today. Taking a Celeron 600 to 1080 (a 80% overclock) and this was with regular air cooling and daily used at this Mhz. With some extra cooling I even got it to 1136, sadly I never got the elusive 1200 a 100% overclock.

Honorable mention: Asrock 775Dual-VSTA
this was crap from all angles, very limited overclocking, slow performance, but it had one special feature that nothing else could offer. It's the perfect transitional board, for people who couldn't afford to replace their entire system all at once. This was the period when DDR was being replaced by DDR2, AGP with Pci Express. This board had both an AGP And a PCI Express Graphics slot, and both DDR and DDR2 memory support. So I could do a staggered upgrade of all my components.
 
I remembering reviewing that one way back in the day. It was an excellent motherboard at a pretty good price point if I recall correctly. The only reason I didn't rank that higher is because it's not my favorite form factor.
I wouldn't ding it for being mATX. Hell, that's a plus! Now that multi gpu setups are fading... what is all that extra board for? I had SLi on the Gene, watercooled, and an audio card sammiched in between. One of my favorite builds and the Gene made it happen... all the features and performance of the top Rampage boards but in mATX and just under $200 if I remember correctly.
 
I wouldn't ding it for being mATX. Hell, that's a plus! Now that multi gpu setups are fading... what is all that extra board for? I had SLi on the Gene, watercooled, and an audio card sammiched in between. One of my favorite builds and the Gene made it happen... all the features and performance of the top Rampage boards but in mATX and just under $200 if I remember correctly.

All that extra board is for M.2 slots.
 
This is a great discussion thread!

I nominate the Asus P3B-F Slot 1 ATX motherboard. This in my opinion was one of the nicest 440BX motherboards out there back in the day. Very high quality construction with all Japanese capacitors before that was a big thing (as did most Asus boards in the late 90s), heavy weight circuit board, and nice component placement. They also had 4-DIMM slots and would run stably with 4x256MB PC-100/PC-133 DIMMs (1 whole GB of RAM possible on a late 90s consumer motherboard!), plenty of PCI slots, yet two ISA slots for older tech sound/network cards. They also overclocked quite nicely too, and there were quite a number of mods being done by the enthusiast community too. Boards like this definitely established Asus as one of the premiere motherboard vendors back in an era where there were dozens of motherboard manufacturers and most weren't that great. I regret ever parting with mine. It had a Powerleap Tualatin adapter in it with a 1.4GHz Celeron and 1GB of memory when I parted with it.....ran Win2K and early WinXP like a champ.

Similar runner up.....Asus P2B.
 
The thing I remember the most about BX6 (other than it was also one of my favorites from my favorite era of modding/overclocking) was the Softmenu voltage mod feature that would basically allow you to instantly murder your CPU. Never before or since has such malevolent power been put in the hands of noob overclockers!
 
Honorable mentions ...

..anything VIA chipset :)

Seriously though, I do have very fond memories of my ASUS P2B and PII 350 w/128mb PC100 ... I lost my virginity to that whore
 
I still have a Rampage III Formula running with a i7 930. It has been going strong almost continuously since 2010, going straight from my gaming rig to a HTPC and is now my kids pc.
 
I nominate the Asus Sage c621e - dual cpu, quad sli, bmc, decent audio, lots of ram, and overclocking.
 
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I nominate the Asus Sage c621e - dual cpu, quad sli, bmc, cecent audio, lots of ram, and overclocking.

I wouldn't have added that to the list simply because I had never worked with that motherboard. The original article was only based on my personal experiences. Sounds fantastic on paper though.
 
I need to read through this whole thread. My top was probably the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe. Working at a small computer shop at the time, I sold so many Athlon T-birds on that board and we had almost no problems on them - probably only RMA'd 1 or 2 out of 400 or more. On top of that they were great for over clocking and had integrated GB ethernet.
 
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