Question for everyone abuot Mobo's -- opinion really

[khelbena]

I was wondering if one specific manufacturer of Motherboards is better than the other. Having looked at sever different mother boards they all seem to do the same things use the same types of architecture or whatever. It seems to come down to Bios features and software/hardware features.

What is your opinion on which is best?

Start Edit:

Ok maybe I didn't quite explain myself. I am interested in Gaming Motherboards. The following are the ones I am looking at.

Abit KN8 Ultra
Fatal1ty AN8 SLI
Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
MSI K8N Diamond
MSI K8N SLI Platinum
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Biostar NF4UL-A9
Biostar N4SLI-A9

I think I am leaning towards the SLI setups.

 

[Nodsu]

Define best. And there is no best anyway - different people want different things.

Come on, you could at least list the ones you were looking at

 

[Didou]

I'd say Tyan is quite high when it comes to board quality.

 

[PanicX]

Look for boards that have the features you need, I prefer to use MOBOT to find motherboards with the features I want. Then do a search for a review of that motherboard.

However when the chips are down and all things equal, I wouldnt hesitate to buy an ASUS, DFI, or Tyan.

 

[SOcRatEs]

Ditto

I'd say Tyan is quite high when it comes to board quality.

I second this!

 

[Justin]

As others have said, it depends entirely on the application, and the price.

For my personal machines, I go for feature-rich boards that offer very high performance. I tend to stick to ASUS and ABIT as they've treated me well over the years. Occasionally I will try other brands, but as a whole I've found ASUS motherboards to be consistently on the leading edge of performance. I've had a few duds from them, but that's another thing I like about them - excellent warranty service. I always buy retail ASUS, which gives me a very nice 3 year long warranty on my boards. A few months ago a brownout caused one of my A7N8X-E boards to flake out... two weeks later, I had a new board from them.


For workstations or servers or otherwise dedicated machines that don't need to be feature rich, but must be extra reliable, I look at two manufacturers: Intel and Tyan.

Intel goes a bit crazy with BIOS updates, but the rock-solid stability I've found in their server line makes it worthwhile. A co-lo server I have I built with an entry-level Intel server board and slapped a celeron in there. It's never crashed, frozen, stalled or otherwise gone down once, unless I restart it. For AMD cpus I like Tyan. I started like Tyan way back in the day with their S1563, a board that allowed you to run Dual Pentium MMX 233. Later I managed to get ahold of a Tyan Tiger MPX, a dual Athlon motherboard. That thing was a beast!