waterbeesje wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:46:

Ah, the M577 is actually my super 7 testing board of choice! It's a bit slower than you'd expect from mVP3 but it literally eats […]
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PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:52:

As much as I bash PCChips, they have some okay-ish boards as well. M577 and M726MRT (the combo slot version w/ 370 and Slot1) seem to be fairly stable, although a bit slower than usual boards (MVP3 and Aladdin Pro 2)

Ah, the M577 is actually my super 7 testing board of choice! It's a bit slower than you'd expect from mVP3 but it literally eats any CPU you throw at it 😁

And the pcb isn't made from cardboard as well, like my M537dma33 for example

(Yes, I do possess my fair share of pc chips randomness)

My MVP3 board of choice would be Luckytech's P5MVP3. I've yet to see a board so great, besides the well known legends like ASUS P5A, PCChips M577, Epox MVP3 series, DFI P5BV3/K6BV3/P5XV3/K6XV3.
It's been my go-to choice for K6-II+ (as a matter of fact, the chip on it is exactly a K6-II+/500ACZ) and Voodoo 3 3000.

SYE/Luckytech's boards were usually that case of "obscure" brand nobody heard of, which turned out to be as reliable as an ASUS or even MSI board. Of course, recaps are usually in order, but that generally applies to most of the stuff from that era.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-14, 10:26:

My MVP3 board of choice would be Luckytech's P5MVP3. I've yet to see a board so great, besides the well known legends like ASUS P5A, PCChips M577, Epox MVP3 series, DFI P5BV3/K6BV3/P5XV3/K6XV3.
It's been my go-to choice for K6-II+ (as a matter of fact, the chip on it is exactly a K6-II+/500ACZ) and Voodoo 3 3000.

SYE/Luckytech's boards were usually that case of "obscure" brand nobody heard of, which turned out to be as reliable as an ASUS or even MSI board. Of course, recaps are usually in order, but that generally applies to most of the stuff from that era.

I don't know about that. I came from this board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/qdi-p5 … 0tx-titanium-ib The only jumper it had as "Clear CMOS", all the voltage and clock multipliers were BIOS settings, ATX power, SDRAM, stable as anything, had a tool for adding your own custom images to the boot screen, and still running today with the original capacitors after a 4 year stint at an ex girlfriend's apartment who smoked and 15 years in a box in the back of a closet.

Going back to this in the next generation was shitty shitty shitty:

And that's before we start to look at the bimonthly 4-1 VIA driver updates that often seemed to require a full OS reinstall to work correctly.

MSI MS-6330 variant
It had leaking and/or bulging capacitors within maybe 18 months or so and had started becoming unstable somewhat earlier.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-14, 04:02:

My most shitty PC Chips motherboard I have is an M741LMRT .. it has defied me... I've got about 7 or 8 other PC Chips that are fine for what they are, even a couple that impress me. This one though, has all the frequently complained of faults. Thin board, bad soldering, general jank.

The shitty to working ratio of PC Chips though is HIGHER that that of Asus boards here, with a dead A7V333 A7V133 P2B P3B among those number. So Asus actually gets first place for shitty boards, because 30% of their boards I have don't work right.

I've had about the same experience. I got lucky and made some strong retro-pc part contacts over the years, from recycling to refurbishing centers as well as other collectors, and i've had loads of boards from various manufacturers pass trough my hands. So far Asus has been the most dissapointing brand. Their low-end boards are pure e-waste, with a few exceptions. Their mid-end boards are 50/50. I've had no issues with P2B boards, I've had some that came covered in mud, with rusty I/O, witch, after a good wash, inspection and replacement of destroyed I/O (PS/2, serial, etc) posted just fine. The P3B on the other hand is not as reliable, but it is nicer to use when it works.

I did own asus boards I liked a lot - the Asus P6T Deluxe is a good board, I've had 3 of these over the years, used for different builds (server, gaming PC, work PC) and they all worked like champs. I was also pretty happy with an Asus P9X79 DELUXE. In fact I still have the whole PC. 3930k, still doing 4.2GHz on that board, 16GB of 2133MHz DDR3 ram, and a GTX 580. That build lasted me since 2012 all the way up to 2020, first used as a workstation, and later as my primary PC. It's had 7970 GHz edition, R9 280x, GTX 970, GTX 1070, and even a GTX 1080ti in there, and it was used, at least for the latter part of it's life.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-14, 04:02:

Gigabyte comes second with 20% Though on a lot fewer boards and I'm angrier at them because some were bought new enough that warranty replacement should have happened but they were all deny deny deny.

I don't get nearly as many old Gigabyte boards, but with the exception of the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP (2 boards, same symptoms) witch I have stability issues with, a few GA-7VAXP KT400 boards (2 out of 3 dead boards, shorts, bad VRM - worked when put in storage, let out magic smoke when I retested them months later) and the dog slow GA-8IPE1000, I find gigabyte to be fairly reliable. In fact some of my more recent modern builds have had Gigabyte boars and I'm very happy with them. Right now my main PC is running an B550M Aorus Elite. Before that I had a B450 Aorus M. Before that I used an MSI Z77-G45 that was quite OK, and before that I had a Gigabyte X79-UD7 witch had a wierd issue where it would fail to post and reset CMOS settings every 3-7 days or so. I still have one of these, another board I sourced second hand, it has the same issue.

Gateway 2000 486-33 ( Micronics motherboard )
Reasons: Limited Bios , Bios is Very Flakey

AST Bravo 486-33 ( Proprietary motherboard )
Reasons: Proprietary bios, Limited Bios, unable to upgrade cache

I suppose I've been pretty lucky.

Some bad systems I've encountered:

IBM ThinkPad T23 - The Worst!
They have a bad habit of components on the bottom of the system board spontaneously breaking free of their solder joints.
I have observed this failure in at least eight of these laptops. It is a chronic problem with them.
If you can take proactive measures to strengthen the solder joints, or repair them when they fail, they're actually pretty good laptops.

Asus TUSL2-C
I bought one of these on the strong recommendations of many reviewers and the experiences of folks right here on VOGONS.
Mine booted up twice, then never again.

ABIT KV85
It's not terrible, but the onboard Ethernet never worked right.
The onboard Ethernet would completely freeze up until you removed power for about two minutes.
Solution: disable onboard Ethernet in the BIOS.

ABIT KT7A
These are both the best and worst motherboards.
They have several flaws and quirks. You need to know them and understand them if you want to have a positive experience.
Even then, you may encounter a new flaw/quirk.
Recap yours immediately. The KT7A is the poster-child of the capacitor plague.

Surprisingly good:
PC Chips M861G
No problems whatsoever. It is rock solid.
I've never recapped mine.
It just keeps rocking right along when other contemporary boards (ABIT KV85) have failed or had issues, even after recapping.

Other boards that have performed flawlessly for me despite some bad reviews:
Asus M4A77TD
ABIT IP35 Pro

ABIT of that era, up until the NF7 (which I suspect is Oskar Wu's last mainboard before he moved to DFI), were known to have bad caps.
It didn't help that some of ABIT's boards were rebadged ECS mainboards (KV85 being a rebadged K8M800-M2).
Even my own BP6 and BE6-II were absolute pain in the ass until I figured out their BIOS settings.

SPBHM wrote on 2013-03-29, 01:34:

PC chips M598...

slow, unstable...

My M598LMR ran an AMD K-6 II+ 450 @ 550mhz no problem with a voodoo 3 3000.

Socket3 wrote on 2024-03-14, 17:10:

but with the exception of the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP (2 boards, same symptoms) witch I have stability issues with,

Yeah, those bastards... there's a capacitor to AGP strap mod which sorta helps, still haven't determined if there's a perfect GPU for them or if they'll only ever like something like a tame and lame GF2MX. All the BIOS revisions though, seem like remove 2 bugs, insert 2 replacement bugs.

Dell Optiplex GX computers.
These Motherboards were plagued with Bad Capacitors. Otherwise Good computers.

The worst board ever I got was a „Syntax Socket A (?)“ Motherboard. Elitegroup is normally already budget, Syntax was the budget line of Elitegroup 😀 Try once, never again (In the Past, I sold used computers and I always Update CPU / Mobo to something beafier to sell it better 😀 )

BigMaQ wrote on 2024-03-15, 18:30:

The worst board ever I got was a „Syntax Socket A (?)“ Motherboard. Elitegroup is normally already budget, Syntax was the budget line of Elitegroup 😀 Try once, never again (In the Past, I sold used computers and I always Update CPU / Mobo to something beafier to sell it better 😀 )

I forgot about Syntax. They were terrible. They were like the McDonald's happy meal toy of motherboards. Even when they worked, they were crap.

Between Syntax and Mercury, I'd gladly take Syntax. Mercury are even more worse than Syntax.

adam731432 wrote on 2024-03-15, 13:53:

SPBHM wrote on 2013-03-29, 01:34:

PC chips M598...

slow, unstable...

My M598LMR ran an AMD K-6 II+ 450 @ 550mhz no problem with a voodoo 3 3000.

I will be honest, since that post my opinion on the m598lmr has shifted a bit, It has proven very stable and durable in the last few years, provided I have the last bios and limited to FSB 95, I have it as my dos machine using the onboard video and an ISA sound card with a P 233 MMX and it's fine,

I like that it accepts AT and ATX power no problem, has a modern feeling bios,

mkarcher wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:53:

waterbeesje wrote on 2024-03-13, 19:19:

Also had a HP Vectra 486 which was easy too slow, probably because it had no cache at all and couldn't even be added.

Let's all hail HP for them inventing the idea of the Covington Celeron core before the Pentium Pro was even a thing!

Running a 486 system with contemporary RAM without L2 cache is clearly a bad idea, especially as most 486 chipsets can easily provide a 2-1-1-1 burst at 33 MHz FSB clock on L2 cache hits.

There were also those Compaq ProLinea 486 motherboards with no L2 cache, but people love those and put Pentium Overdrive chips in them.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-14, 04:02:

Maybe I should put noughties Dells in zeroth position though, but it's a whole system thing, the boards are artificially brain damaged for memory and graphics support and PSUs don't have enough drive connectors. Work in supplied config, but real throwaway engineering.

I never had RAM or graphics card compatibility problems with them. They were boring and the clamshell cases sucked, but they were stable. It took a lot of blown caps to finally take one down. Then you recap it and watch it last longer than everything newer you bought.

SPBHM wrote on 2024-03-16, 00:27:

adam731432 wrote on 2024-03-15, 13:53:

SPBHM wrote on 2013-03-29, 01:34:

PC chips M598...

slow, unstable...

My M598LMR ran an AMD K-6 II+ 450 @ 550mhz no problem with a voodoo 3 3000.

I will be honest, since that post my opinion on the m598lmr has shifted a bit, It has proven very stable and durable in the last few years, provided I have the last bios and limited to FSB 95, I have it as my dos machine using the onboard video and an ISA sound card with a P 233 MMX and it's fine,

I like that it accepts AT and ATX power no problem, has a modern feeling bios,

Granted it was 25 years ago I don't remember many BSOD or stability issues. Allot of quakeII was played. Now I have a P5A-B which is almost identical. I do prefer the bios adjustable fsb/multiplier on the M598. The only motherboard I have ever had any problems with was a Foxconn.