what mobo manfacturer do you swear by?

I can't address your 1st question, but re your 2nd question, all of the answers here are individual's opinions. Some are based on what people read or hear, some are based on direct experience (such as mine).

I have had 2 Asus boards a P4C800 Dlx and a P4P800E Dlx, and based on my experience Asus boards are very hard to beat performace-wise. However, I have had some problems with each of my Asus boards. The worst problem was a CPU socket circuit failure after 2 years of perfect operation. I thought my CPU had died, but subsequently discovered the problem was with the P4C800's CPU circuitry. The other board had a bad NIC chip from the 'get go'. I also had a few BIOS-related problems, which were cured by subsequent BIOS updates.

On the other hand, I have owned 2 Intel boards, as has my brother and my son. None of those Intel boards ever had a malfunction or compatibility issue of any kind (I often refer to them as being 'boringly reliable').

 

if you let some have phisical access to your machine and then let them install a bios rookit then thats just stupid
lodore

 

I don't know what this remark is referring to, but if it's re my post, the BIOS problems to which I alluded had nothing to do with rootkits!

 

Some mobos come with a Linux CD drivers. The better way to ensure Linux compatibility is to look at Linux forums.

Both will server you very well. Both have good reliability and Asus boards tend to perform a little better (without counting overclocking)

 

Agreed

 

I like ASUS motherboards, so far thay have performed really well for me.

 

ASUS and MSI as well.

 

I,ve had really excellent luck and yes i do call it luck of the draw when it comes to this particular componant of a computer because you well know what a massive wreck can be made if your mobo gets overwhelmed in some form or fashion you didn't quite expect, maybe a lightning surge? Or overheat or another issue?

PCchips is served the needs of my table top duties surprisingly well and going on 4 years solid and sustained now.

I will no doubt try another manufacturer for my next board however since i want it to be as modular as possible and easily interchangable when it comes to plug-ins etc.

 

i don't swear by any mobo manufacturer but i have 2 msi's and no issues with them.

 

ASUS & MSI. Both have worked flawless on all my systems, so I'm gonna stick with those two.

 

One that has also been left out, not really surprised, not exactly mainstream is Tyan. Aimed more at the server market. I got introduced to them when I was given a brand new in the box AMD Opteron 940. 4 years and several upgrades later still going strong.

 

I too don't swear by
though I do occassionally swear at

I do however like Tyan's

 

Tyan, Supermicro, Iwill = the server/workstation guys

 

Have you seen one of their newer boards? New to me anyways. It will support 4, that`s right 4 dual-core Opterons, theoretically 32 Gigs of ram, and PCI-e as well. Would love to base my FINAL build on that board.

 

1. Asus - Reliability and performance. I do swear by them, and plan to use them exclusively in the future. I have 2 6+ yr old Pentium 3 Asus motherboards that still work today that endured years of constant use, overclocked and in houses with relatively poor/old electrical wiring. Most (not all) have great compatibility as well, but they have been found to do some mild overclocking to boost stock performance (it's never caused any problems here).

2. Intel - Rock solid stability and reliability. They do have some performance motherboards, but I have no experience with those.

3. Gigabyte - A mix between the two above

 

My Gigabyte serves me well.

 

stop teasing me

Im just happy that sometime in the future when I have the $$$
I'll be able to drop 2 dualcore opterons into my current board (K8W)

 

Moi? Tease? I drool over it every chance I get.

 

whoa *drools*
is that meant for servers or workstations?
because how much power do you need?
whats next 4 sockets for intel quad core?
and like 64gb of ram?
geez im still on single core
lodore

 

Really intended for Servers, but nothing says you could not make one heck of a Workstation out of it.

Power requirements would depend on what else you built into it. How many HDDs, optical drives, type of graphics card(s), etc. I run 650 W on my 2 towers......they have 1000 W ones available now. Also, the 32 Gig of ram is only theoretical. There are only 16 Dimm slots, four per processor. It would require 16 two Gig sticks to max it out. Have never seen them offered anywhere yet. As far as what is next? The sky is the limit. Technology is moving ahead by leaps and bounds every day. Less then 10 years ago 1 GHZ processors were only dreamed of. The same with 1 Gb sticks of ram.

 

actually they are pretty common
of course they are buffered and ECC
but most server boards require registered and error corrected RAM

more to the point though are applications and an operating system that can take advantage of that much memory
not a problem in server software and workstation aps custom written for rendering
but your typical 32bit OS has a limit of 4GB virtual memory address space (combined both physical and pagefile) and further most aps are limited to 2GB as a process

if this is of any real interest you can look here for more indepth info
(32 vs 64bit, 3GB switch, 4GB tuning, 2GB process\cache barrier ect)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=4174039&postcount=8

were it really starts to get complicated is the ability for the OS and aps to employ not only the memory effectively(NUMA) but also the multiple cores, what the default affinity management is within the ap\OS
and what kind of tuning is possible

 

Intel! Rock solid D875PBZLK. Not flashy but handles anything thrown at it quietly!

 

In all my years of computer use, just over 9 in fact, I've never bought a motherboard so I dunno which would be good.

 

I use this motherboard :
MSI (939/PCI-E) K8N SLI Platinum nForce4UltraSLI 4DCDDR4 Sata 7.1ch FW Glan (requires 450W)

And this is my CPU :
AMD Athlon 4400+ 64Bit X2 Dual-Core Processor, designed for multi-tasking.

Operating system :
Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 (32bit)

But I'm not married to MSI, motherboards don't really interest me and they look ugly.

 

TonyW,Just joking with you here. In 9 years every or only the one computer you have uses a mobo.