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Those of you who have built more than once, what motherboard manufacturer(s) is the best in terms of longevity?

L

LegoTekFan486

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Like one that either was still working when there was another reason to upgrade, or it lasted an impressively long time: enough to make that brand your first choice for the next build?
 
As someone who has reviewed boards for many years, been a service technician, enthusiast, and an IT professional (at large, small corporations and governments) I've worked with just about every board manufacturer out there. I've been in the hobby since about 1995 and I've been a professional in the industry since 1997. I've probably reviewed something like 200 motherboards over the years. I've also probably had about 40 or so systems personally for context. At best I can only estimate how many systems I've built for friends and their families. It's definitely dozens.

There was a time where I'd have said that ASUS was probably the best and most consistent brand in my experience. Historically, in the larger context I suppose that's probably still true. Back in the day, I rarely ever had issues with ASUS boards Despite the sheer number of them I've used professionally and personally. It's not to say I've never had problems with them but all the ones I have had major problems with were all review boards. Out of those there only four that were problematic and three of them were the same model. Otherwise, super consistent and largely free of quirks. That said, ASUS has specific quirks that are consistent with all their boards. Things like their temperature sensors reading on the cold side compared to everyone else's.

It's not as if GIGABYTE or MSI were bad at the time. It's that their boards were often quirky. Either through design choices that were made such as GIGABYTE's 680i SLI board that had four network ports on it or just by virtue of being quirky. Keyboard compatibility problems on USB ports and things like that. MSI was much the same in that I would have little issues such as a given USB port not working with certain devices, or the same USB keyboard issues that GIGABYTE had. Back in the day the non-ASUS boards also didn't always recover as smoothly from a bad overclock and things like that. MSI was usually slightly less problematic because they stuck closer to Intel spec for FSB and base clocks.

In recent years, things have changed. I've found ASUS boards have gotten a bit quirkier and MSI and GIGABYTE have both gotten better. At this point I think they are about the same. People do bring up issues like ASUS USB port issues but to be honest I've experienced quirks with USB ports from every manufacturer. This always comes down to their internal USB hub design or whether or not they are using a separate stand-alone third party USB controller. Usually the hub design often works better leading to fewer compatibility issues. The issues are always with the ports not native to the chipsets. This is why I didn't specifically mention ASUS' USB quirks earlier, as I've seen it with every board maker out there. I think ASUS' prevalence is why you hear about it with ASUS boards more commonly than others.

The elephant in the room for me is always ASRock. People bring them up as a beacon of quality and act like they are premium boards priced lower because they are from a less greedy company. This is untrue in my experience. I have literally had more problems with ASRock boards than every other brand combined. That even includes some of the board makers that aren't around anymore. ASRock doesn't price their boards cheaper out of kindness or by being less greedy. It does so because it tries to make more money through volume sales. It does this by cutting different corners than other board makers. Literally all board makers cut corners. The difference is where they cut them. ASRock often uses thinner PCB's, soldering isn't as nice, etc. They also cut corners on packaging as well. There was a time where I wouldn't use their boards in anything of mine. I could get these boards for free and wouldn't use them.

Now, having said that, I think ASRock is miles ahead of where they used to be and have generally achieved parity with the other companies in most product price segments. The last several ASRock boards I've looked at over say the last four years or so have been solid boards. Even lower end boards have been pretty reliable for me. At least in the context of a review which doesn't provide long term data as we only have them for a short time.

Then, there is everyone else. EVGA, (some new company I can't bother to look up right now), BioStar, and a few others. These are largely irrelevant in my opinion. EVGA's motherboard business is a shadow of what it used to be and they only ever have one or two models at anytime and they are premium products at that. Unless you like the aesthetics of them or are an EVGA fanboy, there really isn't any reason to get one of these over higher end products from the big three or even a high end ASRock board. ASRock is the OEM for NZXT, so its irrelevant unless you like ASRock and plastic cladding on your mid-range boards and want to pay a premium for the privilege of picking between white plastic and black.

For BioStar and everyone else the biggest problem is that these companies essentially have little footprint in North America. I'd be worried about warranty support. Their availability isn't always there either. All but one BioStar board I reviewed was actually quite good but I can't really come up with a reason to buy one of their boards over something from the big three. Unless you can get one of these at a substantial discount, I can't see them as particularly compelling.

For what its worth I've had DOA boards and boards shit the bed from the big three. I've also had some absolutely fantastic ownership experiences out of the big three board makers. This isn't to say they were 100% problem free, but the ownership experiences have been solid. I've got an MSI X570 Godlike that's still going strong, the GIGABYTE X399 Designare EX is one of the best boards I've ever tested and used personally. (Maybe the only 100% flawless board I've ever used.) My current ASUS Z690 Maximus Extreme has been nearly flawless after resolving firmware issues with the integrated NIC early on.

In other words I'd rate them about like this:
  • ASUS/GIGABYTE/MSI (These are all equal in my book.)
  • ASRock (Very close to the top three)
  • EVGA (Not bad, but offer very little to nothing over alternatives.)
  • Everyone else
 
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All have lasted. I still have a working motherboard and CPU from the LGA 1366 days. It's been what, 18 years now? Also a lot from the LGA 2011, 1155, and 1150's. Still working after 13-14 years. ASUS, ASrock, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Supermicro... tried them all. Even a recent Chinese Brand, Huananzhi. Only had one board that was bad, and only because it arrived with a capacitor that fell off. I soldered it back on and worked flawlessly.
 
El_Capitan said:
EVGA Classified SR-2? The dual LGA 1366 setup was all the rage back then.
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I'm talking about current models. Not HEDT / Workstation motherboards of yesteryear. Yes, I provided historical context for the brands in general, but outside of the SR-2, EVGA didn't have much to offer. Most of their boards were reference designs of the NVIDIA chipset boards. Their FTW's were generally good as they took the reference designs and overhauled the voltage components. However, EVGA did stupid things with their BIOSes and they were finicky to say the least. Sure the X58 Classified was popular and had a nice feature set but it was a quirky bastard. I ended up replacing mine with an ASUS Rampage III Black Edition.
 
Agreed with Dan's big post above. MSI and Gigabyte have improved over the years to the point that they are top of the line along with Asus in my view just by watching forums and Youtube accounts and looking at overall trends. That said, Asus isn't perfect, either, as Dan points out. Asrock has also improved recently, especially in VRM design. Currently, I wouldn't have an issue building a system from any of those 4 brands, honestly. All brands tend to have some models with poor design choices it seems (although even that seems to be dropping lately which is a good thing), but that's just how things work when cost is the driving factor. My personal experience is with Asus mostly over the last 25+ years (Abit, Elitegroup Computer Systems and Micronics before that) and I've never had a failure, but my build count is tiny (about 15 computers over the years) and I tend to choose the more expensive models for my builds in more recent years which may or may not skew things. The only reason I tend to go Asus is simply "it's what I've always used" and nothing more.
 
I haven't touched an ASUS mobo since Taulatin. They've been screwing people out of warranties since then. I've been using Gigabyte almost exclusively with a few MSI in between. All the MSI turned to banta poodoo quickly. I wish Abit, EPoX and TYAN consumer boards were still around.
 
In the last few years I've had a bit of a reshuffle in how I see them. ASRock and MSI have climbed to the top, while Gigabyte is a close second and Asus is on the "do not buy even with other people's money" list. Most of my issues with Gigabyte are due to weird designs and awful software that sometimes you have to use just to get the drivers because they don't always list them on their site (just went through this with an X870 board with wifi 7).

Asus I don't even consider, unless as an absolute last resort. The number of problems I've had with their stuff in just the last generation alone is enough to remove the benefit of doubt.
 
I was always a Gigabyte person mostly and my current is the MSI x570 tomahawk wifi and no issues, things just seemed to work for me, have never had to RMA a board since I started building 20+ years ago....so another for the Asus/Giga/MSI train.
 
wra18th said:
I haven't touched an ASUS mobo since Taulatin. They've been screwing people out of warranties since then. I've been using Gigabyte almost exclusively with a few MSI in between. All the MSI turned to banta poodoo quickly. I wish Abit, EPoX and TYAN consumer boards were still around.
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That's hilarious since all the EPoX boards I saw back in the day were all crap. ABIT used to be great and then during the "abit" days, their quality fell off a cliff.

As for the ASUS warranties, the one time I needed to deal with their technical support outside of their PR guys, it was a great experience. Out of the dozens of boards I've bought, I've never had a failure out of them.
 
Dan_D said:
That's hilarious since all the EPoX boards I saw back in the day were all crap. ABIT used to be great and then during the "abit" days, their quality fell off a cliff.

As for the ASUS warranties, the one time I needed to deal with their technical support outside of their PR guys, it was a great experience. Out of the dozens of boards I've bought, I've never had a failure out of them.
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I've failures with ASUS boards and the one I tried to RMA was declined without explanation. I admit to only ever having bought one EPoX board and it was great. I can't remember the model exactly but it was for AMD. I've had 4 MSI boards in a row be complete crap for both Intel and AMD. I'm playing with one now that seems good. Zero Gigabyte failures since 2002. I built 6 PCs last year, all Gigabyte.
 
wra18th said:
I've failures with ASUS boards and the one I tried to RMA was declined without explanation. I admit to only ever having bought one EPoX board and it was great. I can't remember the model exactly but it was for AMD. I've had 4 MSI boards in a row be complete crap for both Intel and AMD. I'm playing with one now that seems good. Zero Gigabyte failures since 2002. I built 6 PCs last year, all Gigabyte.
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Been building for 25 years, I've returned to Gigabyte after lackluster experience from ASUS & MSI . Currently using an ATX Aorus Elite with Intel Core ultra 7-265K and Aorus Micro ATX with AMD. I would say the board quality and feature list is very good for my purposes, but the BIOS support is not as it used to ,be in particular their auto update system GCC is never current and user manual support lacking at least for the Intel Z890. On the other hand they respond quickly if you reach out directly to check for updates or to tech support.
 
GB was my go to, liked the features/price and they were blue :) my current asus is my first.
 
Not a direct answer to the question, but I feel it's relevant. I've had great experience with MSI rma/customer service in the past. I recommend them just for that.

That said, I've built dozens of computers over the years with varying manufacturers, and the only boards I've had any issues with were from asrock.
 
SticKx911 said:
Not a direct answer to the question, but I feel it's relevant. I've had great experience with MSI rma/customer service in the past. I recommend them just for that.

That said, I've built dozens of computers over the years with varying manufacturers, and the only boards I've had any issues with were from asrock.
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I had to do a video card RMA with MSI and it was an absolutely horrible experience. Sent a card in that had no physical damage. They sent the same one back with damage heat sink fins and said it was fine. They did nothing. It didn't work when I got it back either. I've never had to RMA their motherboards.
 
I guess I've been lucky, built probably 10 machines, never had an issue with a motherboard. I would avoid Asus based solely on other people's warranty problems. I have a couple 10 year old boards, both asrocks I think? I haven't opened them up in some time.... Everything older than that is just, too old. It's been turfed.
 
My gigabyte boards have been surprisingly trouble free over the years. I say surprisingly because several were the cheapest model available for the socket matx board. Probably had about 5 over 10 years wirhout issue.
 
I've been buying Asus for 30 years for my main builds and haven't had an issue with any of them.
here is an older pic when I was cleaning out my closet,
boxes.jpg
 
Keljian said:
My advice is buy on features/price point.
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This would be my advice as well, of all the boards I've bought and used, the ones with the features I most liked, are my favorite boards.

Although also, stay the hell away from day 1 Gen 1 of everything. Buy cheap shit from mature platforms.
 
Soltek FRN2 motherboard been running since new in 2003. Bought after reading a favorable review here at [H]ard. Played some Unreal Tournament and Max Payne on that nForce2 system last evening. Would buy another but the company dissolved LONG ago. Long live Golden Flame.


goldenflame.jpg
 
I have many builds, some with ASUS, some one or two with Asrock, most with MSI. I have used Gigabyte before, I want to say, but not lately; I mostly use them for GPUs, if I need to.

In my experience,
  • MSI has just been reliable. I've never really had any major issues with them and unlike many brands they tend to make good use of the PCIE lanes (go research PCIE lane distribution if you ever want a fun time).
  • ASUS, my first ASUS budget board (over) a decade ago was a piece of crap and had various issues in an Intel i5-750 system. I tried firing that system up with another MSI board that I got off ebay and I think all my issues just magically went away.
  • But then I had another ASUS STRIX X370-F that I used for a MicroATX build and my impression was that it was just rock solid.
  • For Asrock, I've been using a bottom of the barrel, absolute cheapest possible Mini ITX board from Asrock in my 3080 Ti/11400F Stable Diffusion machine, loaded with 64GB RAM... never a hiccup out of that board, even before it was a Stable Diffusion machine. It's just been excellent all around, and Asrock tends to not be very expensive. Great budget option if it ticks your boxes.


My biggest advice to you is that you can't just use brand as the marker. Some bullet points:
  • The only thing that the brand determines, systematically and directly, is what kind of RMA support you will be getting if shit hits the fan. Some will disagree and maybe some have had better experiences, but reputationally I have seen some horror stories about ASUS. Do your own research about that.
  • But the question of whether shit hits the fan or not is completely dependent on that tier of model, and that generation. You need to do brand agnostic research and just see if that brand is having any issues that gen by scouring through resources about the SPECIFIC board.
  • Also never be an early adopter if you can help it. For instance, ASUS on AM5 early boards had the most eggregious issues with literally frying 7800X3D chips. ASUS boards have piled up in huge numbers in the Microcenter open box section for AM5. Even now, people have a weird time with their memory on AM5 on ASUS sometimes
  • As you can see, it's never really safe to just buy for brand. You need to specifically research models if you actually consistently want a good board. Statistically you might be fine even just picking blind. But if you want to get into the weeds and guarantee it... there's no substitute for your own data.
  • Sometimes there will be issues that are brand agnostic and come from a completely unexpected location. The Intel I225-V network controller present on many ASUS boards and some other brands completely screwed up and crashed my system after some time, and in a fairly consistent way. You wouldn't expect a network adapter of all things to just ruin a motherboard purchase, but there it is.
I know not necessarily useful advice but my TL;DR is... don't buy brand, do model specific research if you actually care. Otherwise, you can probably just pick whatever. For most AM5 chips, power delivery by the motherboards is just not a concern (unless maybe using the very, very cheapest thing you can get), so it comes down to features and I/O.


Edit: ... With all of the fake personas now, now that I look at it, am now starting to wonder if TC is a real person, considering their other topic is a similar Q/A thing, too. Might be market analysis bot.
 
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Susquehannock said:
Soltek FRN2 motherboard been running since new in 2003. Bought after reading a favorable review here at [H]ard. Played some Unreal Tournament and Max Payne on that nForce2 system last evening. Would buy another but the company dissolved LONG ago. Long live Golden Flame.


View attachment 704089
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Soltek
ECS
EPoX
QDI
MTek
Intel
Soyo
DFI
FIC
PCChips
ABIT
iWill
Diamond
Foxconn (They still make boards as an OEM, but no longer brand their own)
BFG Technologies
Chaintech (Exited the business in 2008 and has returned in 2012, but has zero footprint in North America)

Just to name a few brands that are no longer around.
 
wra18th said:
I haven't touched an ASUS mobo since Taulatin. They've been screwing people out of warranties since then. I've been using Gigabyte almost exclusively with a few MSI in between. All the MSI turned to banta poodoo quickly. I wish Abit, EPoX and TYAN consumer boards were still around.
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That's right, they screw me out of warranty too. I was happy to own ASUS products, not anymore.
I bought brand new ASUS board for AM4, 1.5 years later SATA ports started failing when multiple drives were connected. They outright rejected my RMA couple of times, I could do nothing to get to them. So, I got rig of this board, bought ASRock Steel Legend board instead.
I told my ASUS story in posts here on [H], that was around 2023. ASRock board works rock solid since then.
I will never buy ASUS again because of their warranty screwing practices.
 
Dan_D said:
That's hilarious since all the EPoX boards I saw back in the day were all crap. ABIT used to be great and then during the "abit" days, their quality fell off a cliff.

As for the ASUS warranties, the one time I needed to deal with their technical support outside of their PR guys, it was a great experience. Out of the dozens of boards I've bought, I've never had a failure out of them.
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ABIT was my go to in the day. In fact I've been ar a loss ever since as the last ABIT I built i used with minor upgrades for 10+ years.

So OP it's ABIT, but I don't think that will do you any good, lol. Running two ASUS and a SM server board right now.
 
wra18th said:
I wish Abit, EPoX and TYAN consumer boards were still around.
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Abit cheaped out on Chinese capacitors during the great leaking in the early 2000s. It basically ended them. I had a sweet bright orange abit socket a board, with matching Radeon GPU that I liked a lot. I can't remember if it died on me or if I moved on to a 939 board and just turfed it. I don't remember what happened with the GPU either.... They may have both died .... Usually I keep these things for way too long.
 
I forgot to address Tyan. While they've been a staple of the DIY workstation market forever, their consumer boards suffered from the same problem as Intel's own desktop branded boards. Essentially, Tyan didn't understand the enthusiast market and like Intel, didn't remain competitive in that arenda. DIY desktops transitioned to mostly gaming machines about a decade ago. Intel and Tyan never understood what a gaming board was. They kept light on overclocking features and more so in Intel's case, thought they could slap a skull on a motherboard and call it a gaming board. Meanwhile, they were light on features, couldn't overclock and lacked the aesthetic qualities everyone else was pushing at the time.

They also didn't have the water cooling or LN2 specific features that everyone else had options for. Tyan, more than Intel was DOA in this arena. Tyan also had a problem of availability. They were nearly impossible to find. I never saw one in a Fry's or Microcenter as I recall. On the other hand, you could even by a D5400XS at your local Fry's if you needed one.
 
Zepher said:
I've been buying Asus for 30 years for my main builds and haven't had an issue with any of them.
here is an older pic when I was cleaning out my closet,
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I think I see an A7N8X-E Deluxe - that was the board I paired with an Athlon XP 2500+, which was my first build.

I agree with the consensus view thus far: each of the major manufacturers has released excellent boards, and each of the major manufacturers has released lemons. IME, buying better models is a wiser strategy than being loyal to a brand.

Most motherboard failures I've seen were the result of user error, not some manufacturing or design problem.
 
I've been building for ~25 years and currently am with MSI. I've found the voltage regulation to be slightly better than the others at a similar price point.

That's not to say that I don't look around. In the last 3 years I've used Gigabyte, ASRock, and Asus also. I used to swear by Asus, but they seem to want to charge an "Asus Tax" for their products when MSI, Gigabyte, or ASRock make something that will give you 99.9% of the performance for cheaper.

Every chipset and board is different though. With the X870 motherboards, MSI does some trickery to share bandwidth with the USB4 port and the M.2 slots. Asus and Gigabyte have non-standard Wifi connections on the back of the motherboards (good luck finding one of those if you need a replacement). So all things considered, I'd probably look at ASRock which has done a pretty good job with AM4 and AM5 so far. Point is you have to look at each individual board and then make a decision. Something like this Google docs spreadsheet help you sort through the differences.

As for RMA, I only had to use Asus RMA for an old M5A78-USB3 AM3+ motherboard. The thing clearly shouldn't have been allowed to run any high end processor because it had no VRM cooling. I sent in a bad board and got a working one back within a few weeks. No problems.
 
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travm said:
I guess I've been lucky, built probably 10 machines, never had an issue with a motherboard. I would avoid Asus based solely on other people's warranty problems. I have a couple 10 year old boards, both asrocks I think? I haven't opened them up in some time.... Everything older than that is just, too old. It's been turfed
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Yeah, I would say if they're bad at handling warranty issues, I would definitely avoid them based on that alone. Anyone can ship a DUD by mistake, but so long as they make things right in the end, they're still a relatively good company as long as their failure rate isn't ridiculous.
 
Dans big post is my experience also. Asus has always screwed people out of warranty but "back in the day" their boards were head and shoulders better.

Now not true.

Gigabyte and MSI are on top of my list. I also don't hate ASRock for value boards. The biggest issue between these 3 vendors the last few years is that one set of ram that works awesome with one can be unusable on another. IN MY recent experience (yours may vary) Gigabyte and MSI are doing the best job on high speed ram stability and ram compatibility. ASRock second and Asus not so great but I currently avoid them because of their price and warranty issues now. I don't think they offer anything special anymore.
 
I would agree with that. Some of ASUS' more recent boards have not played nice with some RAM kits.
 
Advil said:
Dans big post is my experience also. Asus has always screwed people out of warranty but "back in the day" their boards were head and shoulders better.

Now not true.

Gigabyte and MSI are on top of my list.
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Is there any difference between these two in the length of time of BIOS support, or ease of use and design of the BIOS menus?

Advil said:
I also don't hate ASRock for value boards. The biggest issue between these 3 vendors the last few years is that one set of ram that works awesome with one can be unusable on another.
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Is that a BIOS or hardware issue? Weird. Difference between Intel and AMD boards?

Advil said:
IN MY recent experience (yours may vary) Gigabyte and MSI are doing the best job on high speed ram stability and ram compatibility
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Good to know. I guess my next build will use a board from one of these two vendors.
Advil said:
I don't think they offer anything special anymore.
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How the mighty (ASUS) has fallen. ASUS poor management?
 
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