Favorite Mainboard

[One4yu2c]

Hard to narrow it down to just one, so here's a short list of standouts in no particular order:

Soltek SL-75DRV4 Purple Ray - it was a VIA board, back in the day when VIA really earned themselves a bad rap, but a later revision (KT266a). That little 'a' made all the difference in the world. Performed very well for its time, with decent overclockability, and ably competed with the brand names (Here's and oldie review). Sadly, Soltek has since retreated back into the tech shadows.

Asus A7N8X - along with the Abit NFS-2, the A7N8X made child's play out of taking the affordable Barton 2500+ to 3200+. Kept that board until just a few months ago, until Matt (Prolific) and I threw some parts around it (included my unlocked Barton 2500+) for a friend of his.

Asus P4P800 - another favorite, this little gem on the magnificent i860PE chipset catapulted my P4C Northwood 2.4GHz up to 3.4GHz on air, back when a 1GHz overclock would still be considered impressive. Still nothing to sneeze at nowadays, but not nearly the same feat as back then.

MSI K8N Neo3 and Neo4 Platinum - nothing but excellent performance, a mostly easy to understand BIOS, and OCing rivaled only by DFI's enthusiast level boards. If I had to narrow this list down, MSI would sit at the top.
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Least favorite motherboard (dis)honors goes to Soyo's SY-P4I865PE Plus DRAGON 2 v1.0. Not only did the board just up and die one day without sign or symptoms, but it was supposed to be free after rebate. And it was, three years later when Soyo finally made good on the rebates.

[Athildja-x64]

Yeah, I know other people that have has good success with this board in Non-SLI mode. But it is an SLI board so to me that still puts it in the Fail column.

[Quakindude]

Originally Posted by Athildja-x64

Based on this experience and the input I have recived from others, I came to the opinion that the 590 was a bad board.

I had an Asus 590 based board. IMHO, the 590 chipset was horrific. Within a couple days of learning the BIOS and beginning to play with it, the board started having some serious issues. Prime stable overclocks that initially ran in excess of 12 hours started failing after 30 minutes. Then it wouldn't even run for a minute. After days of trying to get a resolution through Asus, Asus finally told me that it was a bad processor, not the board. So I asked them how a bad processor would cause memory errors since there's no on chip memory controller for Intel CPU's. They hung up on me. Within the next day, both banks of memory slots just stopped working. Got in touch with Asus again and told them the memory slots were bad and that the CPU and memory worked fine in another computer. Asus told me a determination had already been made, there wouldn't be an RMA # issued and that any damage that had occurred as a result of my troubleshooting the board was my fault. I pointed out that their determination was a bad CPU and that wasn't it as the CPU worked fine in another board and how the hell did they know it wasn't a mobo problem when they hadn't even physically inspected the board yet? They hung up on me.

So you won't see me recommend the 590 chipset, other brands of mobo's had too many issues with the 590, and you won't see me recommend anything Asus.

[Athildja-x64]

Do you mean 680? the 590s were for AMD...
The 680i is also another nVidian failure.

[screwballl]

I am the opposite, I prefer only Asus boards and have only once dealt with their support team and it was handled very quickly.

Can't comment on the 590 as I have never used it.

[gvblake22]

WOOO, that's 4 votes for the ol' A7N8X!!

[Tech Geek Deluxe]

I gotta tell ya ... I have been building for 20 years and though many a board has a fond memory ... from Asus to Soyo ... I have just finished 4 builds in the last month.

Asus P5B deluxe [3rd re-build]
Asus P5B plus
Abit IP35 Pro
Gigabyte Ga P35 DS4 Rev 2

Hands down my favorite board of all time is the Abit IP35 Pro ... simply the best features and balance and bios that I have ever had in my hands. There was something that wasn't perfect ... but I can't remember ... because sooo many things are done very right on this board.

BTW ... these are all builds for our house.

[stinger608]

Man, probably my favorite motherboard is the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Platinum!

Its an old socket A, that has both IDE, and SATA raid 0, 1, 0+1. I have had the board now for about 3 years, running a Barton 3200+ using the board as a game server at LAN events, running a Fear game server here at the house, and a Teamspeak server. That mother board has never hiccuped once since firing it up the very first time with a 2500 Barton core!!!
Also the funniest thing, it is running 1.5gbs of ram, 3 512 chips, and it boots to dual channel!!!

[RangerXLT8]

A few boards in my mind are the best.
P5WD2-E, P5W-DH, Gigabyte DS3 and my current board Gigabyte P35C-DS3R.

[halutzparilla]

gigabyte ds3r 965p... other than having it run at high temp its very good to me...

intel boards i never like since i dont use raid, but i heard they good for raid... i own one intel board 975x i nver get that thing to o/c...