Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

[Shodan486]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

Asus boards are a grab bag, even with solid caps.

Can't agree with you, ASUS (to me) seems to be best in technological advancement (placing that Fujitsu capchip near CPU, RAM and chipset really improved stability and eased overclocking struggles) towards stability (NOT cooling, though STACK COOL (or what) seems to be OK). Not speaking about the superior layout of heatspreaders all over the critical areas of mobo. For example there was that Asus Rampage II for LGA775 & LGA1366. Also I was one of the first ones to place my bet on the Bearlake family boards and bought P5E3WS Pro 2 years ago - since then NOTHING has gone wrong - using a 2,6 C2D with FSB1333 and stock fan plus a HD3870 by Sapphire with passive cooling. And yes, the chassis is placed POORLY in my desk with that placement build for computer cases with only a place behind open to exhaust the hot air, which is, BTW, too close to a radiator going full steam. All I want to say is that I deliberately have poor cooling in that case and its placement, my GPU easy reaches 100 celsius and the heat dissipation is very bad - NO FAILURE FOR 2.

OF COURSE please define your experiences with ASUS products, I would like to know why everybody still grumble about them when I see no failures.

[Topcat]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

^
I dont agree. Asus boards are the bottom dwellers of motherboard quality. I've seen more dead asus board than I have any other single brand. Asus is the most frequent board I've encountered where there's nothing detectably wrong with it, but the bastard just won't work. I used to love asus back in the P-classic and P2 days. They went to shit soon after that.

[mockingbird]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

Speaking of which, I bought a defective Asus P5B a while back, replaced all the Koshin Togyo ATWY capacitors on it with Nichicon HM (Was like 20 of them) and the thing still doesn't work. All that happens when I short the power pins is a slight twitching of the CPU fan.

The board says Asus P5B "Green", so I'm wondering if a reflow of the northbridge is in order.

[momaka]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

Speaking of which, I bought a defective Asus P5B a while back, replaced all the Koshin Togyo ATWY capacitors on it with Nichicon HM (Was like 20 of them) and the thing still doesn't work. All that happens when I short the power pins is a slight twitching of the CPU fan.

The board says Asus P5B "Green", so I'm wondering if a reflow of the northbridge is in order.

More likely a shorted MOSFET somewhere.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

Can't agree with you, ASUS (to me) seems to be best in .......... and bought P5E3WS Pro 2 years ago - since then NOTHING has gone wrong -

OF COURSE please define your experiences with ASUS products, I would like to know why everybody still grumble about them when I see no failures.

Well lets pick on the board you brought up. - P5E3WS Pro 2

Cons: My story with this board started out with receiving one that was defective. So I would advise a close inspection of all components, particularly any IC's that are not placed correctly. An IC to the right of the COM1 header, next to the FCC logo was placed crooked and thus mis-soldered. I sent it back without trying to power it up, but I have a feeling the board would've started, but caused all kinds of strange things and could explain why some have had odd ongoing issues. With all the features and much of the real estate used for cooling some of the connectors can get tricky, but with some patience it's not that bad.

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Cons: After my system began intermittently experiencing a multitude of crazy problems within less than a month, including: successfully getting past post to the operating system followed by unprompted and random reboots, continuous-loop rebooting right after post, mouse and keyboard freeze, and unresponsive USB slots sometimes causing the aforementioned problems, I called ASUS tech support and one tech already knew my problem and had told me there were problems with the DIMM slots except A1. ASUS management denied this series is defective, but i doubt them, and now I have been waiting for my board for almost a month to be returned from their service center. One tech even told me not to update the BIOS...which I thought was odd.
Other Thoughts: I have had a BAD experience with a company that supposedly has a great rep.

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Cons: Freeking motherboard killed my $400 raid card in a day and a half. I was getting horrible speeds on my PCI-X raid card, and then BAM! dead. ASUS said that some cards aren't compatible. I thought there were standards for a reason... PCI-X is always PCI-X. 3.3V, THAT'S WHY THERE'S STANDARDS!!!!!! Wouldn't do a thing to help me on the raid card it killed. Returned immediately. Thnx Newegg for being AWESOME.
Other Thoughts: This has been the same experience I've had with every ASUS product I've come into contact with. Bought it b/c it had better specs. Big mistake. Only reason for 2 eggs is the # of ports... Go buy the supermicro C2SBX+. ROCK SOLID. It's been my 3rd supermicro and works FLAWLESSLY.

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Cons: Unstable! I will be exchanging mine in the near future, or getting a refund. Flaky from the start. Bluescreened during first try at WinXP Pro install process, first time I've seen a machine do that.

Two weeks later, I reinstalled Windows XP Pro again -absolutely horrible experience! Took approx. 20 tries to get all the way through setup. System repeatedly froze, or turned off display (no signal from video card, not monitor turning off, possibly an ACPI problem) during Windows XP setup & Fedora Core 9 64-bit setup. Many false "corrupt or missing file" msgs. on known good install media. After discussing problems with video card mfg (XTX PCI Express 2.0 GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition) am convinced problems were caused by this motherboard, not video card.

NOT a good board to run Linux. Live DVD/CD for Kubuntu 8.04.1, 7.04, 7.10, both 64- and 32-bit versions, Fedora Core 9, simply don't work.

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Cons: During my initial startup the mobo did not recognize my cpu. I then proceeded to update the bios, which in turn fried my usb flash memory. After which I continued to have an issue: USB Device over current status detected. Eventually I was able to work around it. I was unable to get a hold of ASUS during this process as the queue for tech support was 90 minutes long.

The startup speed is very slow, initialization alone is like watching molasses run across your 24" lcd.
Other Thoughts: In the future I will not be buying ASUS, in the past I was a strong ASUS advocate.

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Cons: I could not for the life of me get an operating system to install. I tried Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu. I saw more BSODs in one week than in my entire tinkering life of 12 years. Many RAID driver issues. Installation disks would give random stop errors for file checksums being corrupted when I have used and still use the same disks for installations. The BIOS was also quite annoying. By changing seemingly innocuous settings, the BIOS checksum would become corrupted, requiring me to change the jumper settings back to factory default. Not a fun task to do six times when it's hard to reach. Every single time I thought I knew why it wouldn't work, I would repeatedly and unavoidably hit another brick wall. I am RMAing this board in hopes that my next one will work the way it should--ASUS is a solid brand, so I'm hoping this isn't a defective series.

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Cons: Well, the RAID is very rudimentary (at least mirroring). You lose all data in rebuilding the mirror, so you have to off-load to another drive before recreating the array. Another goofy thing I had to learn the hard way is that the BIOS only supports all SATA drives as RAID or all drives stand alone. I wanted one drive for the system and two 750Gb mirrored drives for my data, but nooooo... it wouldn't let me do that. I had to buy another drive to mirror my system drive. That resolved my problems. Gigabyte RAID lets you do both: rebuild a mirrored array by selecting source and target drives and copying the data (not wiping it out) and have one drive as a stand-alone unit and mirroring data drives.
Other Thoughts: This is my first ASUS build. I've used Gigabyte mobo's for 5 previous builds. The Gigabyte BIOS is seems more sophisticated, straight-forward. Oh, and did I mention that Gigabyte's RAID is SUPERIOR!!! If the RAID were better, I'd recommend the board more highly. If I had it to do over again... I'd go with Gigabyte.

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Cons: Bios as shipped DOES NOT support Quad Core CPUs --needs flashed first while booted from a core-2 duo. MAJOR inconvenience. Board is a bit cramped, a new large nvidia card makes taking memory out a pain.

That enough experiences for ya?

Sourced here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131282

Asus is also the most common 'unexplainable problems' mobo here:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/
There was a huge influx of Asus complaints when they went poly and it just never stopped.
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[Shodan486]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

Amazing...now how come mine has no problems except the inferior RAID abilities (yeah they do suck)? Maybe it's the different version of the mobo? Those ghost stories about ASUS drive me crazy. I recommended this board to other 2 pals and they work flawlessly...The only thing why so many people get their random errors might suggest incompatibility with the RAM used, particularly meaning that I checked the QVL list for RAM and had luck finding such as written in that list. That counts for my and friends build, the 3rd build with this board has memory modules not specified in that list, but work without any problems again. BUT I am VERY intrigued with the experience with the burned RAID controller and the flash device - that is very disturbing. All I know basically about this board is that the immediate second BIOS update release killed the board, also I need to mention I'm the victim of the BIOS's F1 screen for not recognizing my CPU (not sure if it's in the list, will check), but don't care ...also it can by bypassed by disabling bios warnings during POST...anyways REALLY no problems with it.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

The thing is.... you are lucky shodan. ASUS just has a multitude of QC problems, and it has been getting worse. The bigger they get, the closer they become ECS (which has the most output out of all the OEMs).

[Shodan486]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

agreed ....BTW we're talkin' Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, maybe it IS because of that ...okay, really now, this is really a strange this behavior of this model, I'll try to google more failures...

[NxB]

Re: Recommended STABLE Motherboard?

I've bought MSI, ECS and Biostar for myself.

ECS K7S5A - Caps. Replacement MSI is kickin still.
MSI- K8Nneo2 - Died with no warning, couldn't fix it. Replacement ECS Kv2-Lite still used as an HTPC.

Now my biostar TA-790gxb has been going for a year+ and no problems.

never ASSus