CPUs And Motherboards

Hello,

The first consideration for me when building a system is not performance or features, but reliability. While I have had good experiences with motherboards from ASUS, SuperMicro and Tyan, I have used Intel brand motherboards for the last few years for my personal systems. There is nothing particularly special about any of the boards I have selected from them over the years. In fact, they look rather plain compared to most motherboard manufacturer’s offerings who like to differentiate their offerings via the coloring of their plastics, but they have all just seemed to work well without any compatibility issues, and Intel is excellent about releasing updated firmware and device drivers for their motherboards.

As it turns out, my next personal system which I am assembling is not going to have an Intel motheboard, but rather one from SuperMicro. The reason for this is quite simple: I was looking for a specific feature set and implementation, and SuperMicro had a motherboard which met those considerations. Right now, I’m still waiting on some RAM, but I am expecting to spend a a fairly uneventful evening building the system.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Asus motherboards, till lately, were always my choice also. But, i bought a new M3A last month. The sound just would not work. RMA’ed it and received a new one. Sound would now work but was scratchey and noisey to the point where it was replaced with a cheap sound card which was a vast improvement. Secound problem, the onboard network card started to hand the system. Asus tech says to upgrade bios and network to lastest releases. Did that, nothing helped. Finally replaced onboard network with a Dlink NIC and the motherboard now works great. Anybody can build a clunker but ASUS tech support was horrible. I have bought about 50-60 of there M/Bs but won’t buy any more after the bad treatment. Check out the ASUS forums on this.

Late February, 2008 I bought a $200 cheapie Sears/Mirus FreeSpire Desktop which I received before catching up with Alan Stafford’s article in PCWorld bad mouthing Linux “cheapie” machines as “no bargain”. Beyond his bias toward MS Windows XP/Vista, his “Linux too complicated, etc for the average User who shops at Sears/Walmart, etc., he commented about the less than stellar hardware of the Mirus Box.

I had to rebut his viewpoint and commented that one measure of quality in my purchase is the use of a ASUS motherBoard P5GC-MX/1333. My argument, that from a quick perusal of its UserGuide, I received a bargain.

Would you comment on the ASUS motherboard argument I offered as valid, or was I clutching defensively, at straws? For now, as a senior citizen, I’m doing all the things I did with my XP, namely, ThunderBird eMail, FireFox Internet, WordProcessing and playing card games, chess, etc.