Who Are The Major Players?

[bgavin]

I stopped building custom systems for clients when technology progressed beyond Socket 462. My clients either wanted server-class machines or inexpensive workstations.

I'm finding it difficult to identify a manufacturer of stable boards. I used to use ABit, but I found they were saved from bankruptcy at the last minute. Asus seems to get negative press here for quality problems. And so forth.

The buyer reviews of ABit boards on Newegg reveals an alarming trend of a very high DOA percentage. I'm seeing this increase.

Q: who are the major players today, who have the bad capacitor problem under control, and offer stable boards?

[willawake]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

i prefer intel original boards for office systems.

[bgavin]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

I see Intel boards selling on Newegg. I thought they were OEM'ed by ECS or ??

[stretch0069]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

I'm still building with Abit, but I just build for myself.....and a couple friends.

[pentium]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

I also go intel for a working envronment.
They have made some great boards.

[willawake]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

I thought they were OEM'ed by ECS or ??

no idea. i thought it was foxconn but might be several oem. they look high quality anyway.

pity about the nichicon HN HM problem otherwise they would have been known for 100% good caps.

there is good documentation on intel site also and they can be bought in bulk boxes for savings....

the only complaint? there is far too many models....its so confusing.

[Topcat]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

Intel or Supermicro.

/thread

[willawake]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

btw if you check out intel boards

BLKDG965SSCK

thats an oem bulk board cos it says BLK. should come in blank cardboard box with accessories but check first, might be board only. i think these are from 5 packs??????

BOXD955XBKLKR

thats a retail box cos it says BOX. all included.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

I found Gigabyte in most cases very stable and easy to setup boards recently.
Not the cheapest, but no mutch trouble comparing with Abit and Asus (naturally, from my limited experience...) to build a stable system.
In most cases loading setup defaults and installing was very painless, no need to tweak the settings for stability.

[Rainbow]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

Do GigaByte boards have good caps now? They used to have bad caps like GSC (or mix of good and bad).
If you need to change any setting for stability, the board is crap. You should only need to change something if you want higher performance.

[willawake]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

i think we saw the worst fails in the past from gigabyte, fets on fire etc....

[gonzo0815]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

All board i recently bought from Gigabyte are featuring only major brand caps, except may be the solid polymers.
And yes, i agree, that BIOS settings should work out of the box, but unfortunately i have not experienced this with ASUS (one of the newer I945 board, and SKT. 939 board) and Abit recently.
Well, just my experience, your milage may vary.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

If there are Intel and Supermicro for the Intel CPU's, are there any others for AMD Socket 939 or AM2?

My current S939 system is a Gigabyte GA-K8U-939, and the only issue I've had with it was a need for a SATA driver update.

Back in the socket 7 days I couldn't stand Gigabyte. I loved my Epox MVP3G5 and Soyo 5EHM though.

Too bad you can't find too many boards that are real server grade and still have the features for a common desktop. I like the Serverworks chipset in my older Compaq and Dell servers.

[Topcat]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

My web servers are Intel SHG2 server boards with serverworks chipsets. Never had a single issue with them, always been rock solid. My 'daily driver' is a supermicro X5DAL-TG2 with a 7505 chipset, again, rock solid. I haven't looked at SM's site lately, but I think they are finally catering to the AMD crowd. Intel will never make boards that support AMD chips anymore, they haven't since the early socket 7 days and the K5's.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

It seems Gigabyte is trying to work itself to a premium brand from the budget crap they used to be. Their design is really improving, and none of the boards I've used have any problems.

Intel is a great board (although OEM by Foxconn, but they use better quality stuff for their Intel OEM, just like Lite-On and Dell), especially for use in corporate environments. Supermicro is Server/Workstation; I think of it as a motherboard that is (definitely reliable) for failsafe or niche environments.

ABit is still good I hope, because I heard they were bought by a company connected to ECS. ECS is actually okay, as long as you replace the caps or keep them extremely cool. Try looking at AMD/ATI Stable Image or Intel Stable Image boards.

ASUS gets slammed for caps, but their barebone systems are well built, or at least the ones I've touched are. MSI and Jetway still seem overall mediocre compared to all these brands, but I've heard MSI is really working at correcting their cap problems.

Supermicro's AMD site is kind of weird... it's http://www.supermicro.com/aplus for some reason. Topcat, do you know why? The funny thing is, I spent over two days trying to look for Supermicro's AMD boards, and I could have found it in ten seconds using Live or Google.


P.S. I love Serverworks chipsets; they are my best friend.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

Foxconn is stamped all over the insides of my Dell Poweredge 500SC and 1400 servers, do they make the boards? I know they make the ribbon cables and cases.

My main Firewall/VPN/DHCP server is a Compaq Proliant DL360 G1 with dual PIII 1.13Ghz, 2GB Ram, and dual 9.1GB SCSI drives in RAID 1. It has a Serverworks chipset, and it's probably the most reliable system I've ever had. I just wish it had more than one power supply...

I've used a couple consumer grade Foxconn boards for desktop builds, and haven't had any problems with them yet.

Back when I had my Asus A7V, I thought it was a real server board but now it is not so reliable anymore.

Does anyone here have any experience with the server boards with the Nvidia Nforce Pro chipsets? How would these compare with other server class boards?

[stretch0069]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

my only Gigabyte was a P3. i hated it. if they are going premium, i might have to revisit them. i'm open to change except with nVidia and AMD. sucks that AMD bought ATI.

oh well....its all a universal conspiracy run by Martians to gain market share from the Alpha Centaurians......

[toastygoodness]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

What's wrong with AMD, besides that the Core 2 Duo is kicking their butt in benchmarks. It's a great brand, extremely cost-effective now because of their price war with Intel. Gigabyte's Intel boards are pretty good; well, at least the ones that use Intel's GMA chipsets. You'll probably never get an AMD Gigabyte board; the combinations for AM2 are all nVidia chipsets. Intel Original boards are pretty good too if you wanna go the intel direction.

I should have worded my previous post better. Lite-On OEMs for Foxconn's power supply contract to Dell. Dell gets from a myriad of motherboard brands. I know HP, for some reason, exclusively uses ASUS in all of their personal computers. I think Dell probably does contract to Foxconn for their motherboards, just like *cough* Apple *cough*. Wow, and you think people buying Apple products think they're getting something "way better" than "PCs", when they're all the same crap nowadays.

[Rainbow]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

Does anyone here have any experience with the server boards with the Nvidia Nforce Pro chipsets? How would these compare with other server class boards?

No nVidia in servers. I've read some messages at Linux Kernel mailing list that there are some problems with data corruption with these chipsets (yes, on expensive server boards!).

[willawake]

Re: Who Are The Major Players?

odd things about amd in one of the big e-chains here
catalogue offers desktop processor types 10 intel, 4 amd and for mobile 10 intel, 3 amd