Q or decent relatively modern MB

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 May 2014 11:25:33 -0700) it happened Robert Baer wrote in :

Ferry Diffi Cult to answer that, There are expensive crap boards and cheap good boards.

It also depends on what you want it for. Some years ago I build a new PC, got a cheap board from local shop, it did not work right. After changing the board for an other one in the shop it still did not work right, After changing processor it still did not work right. As I needed a working PC I ordered a Tyan motherboard, those are several hundred dollar server boards. and that is still working today, and never ever had any problems. No on board sound or graphics, but I addled a high end graphics card and 2 sound cards. But it is old, slow single core processor, Athlon, or Duron, both work in it.

Then a little more than a year ago I got an Asus mobo with on board graphics and sound and it has no end problems. Like yesterday when we had a power failure, after that it no longer recognized the harddisk, took me more than an hour to revive things.. I think BIOS is not good either, some PCI slots do not work with come cards, some problems are documented, other people experienced the same ones, graphics has issues, but could be the Linux drivers, but I tried an expensive graphics card in it, and that had issues too, could be Linux X server, xorg, but really same Linux and xorg runs OK on an other computer, even my laptop. I have a Samsung laptop with plenty problems, USB 3 errors, it has both an ATI (AMD) and Intel graphics on board... The Intel is active, that works OK, also Linux of course. I forgot how to select the AMD... That brings me to an other point of cheap mobos, IF you want to look at pdfs, I use xpdf as viewer, then this ASUS with AMD graphics chip is a nuisance, it is so slow that if you try paging back an forward the thing just cannot keep up. Get a good Nvidia or Intel graphics chip,

Most of these things I found ways to work around (takes time beware) And these days there is that shit BIOS protection that Microsoft came up with that may or may not allow you to boot an other OS, So its a gamble, and even then..

Better do some googling if you select a mobo for what other people experience with it. Do not even bother to read the sales pitches. PS it is not that Asus cannot make good stuff, I have an eeepc 701, and miracle I got it working with Linux distro navigatrix (navigation) yesterday, You would not expect that to work at all after all these years,,, Solid state FLASH disk, no harddisk,. And have a good graphics card with Nvidia chip, also Asus.. But. some products are good , some are bad..

But, if you are only installing a Microsoft product on the thing then that will cause so much irritation that you probably will not notice all the hardware related problems.

What I look for first is does the motherboard have the features I require? Not pie in the blue sky best of the best bleeding edge.

Then I almost have to always have to exclusively go Intel boards for new builds as they have all documentation in detail available online.

In those details I look for the mean time between failure and require that to be in the higher top third of rankings.

That said the only current bought *NEW* motherboard I have on hand currently is the older DG41wv which is not really available anymore.

It sits in the drawer awaiting any of my current systems to fail as do a Core2 duo 7300 and 8400 CPU's

Two Athlon 64 dual core bought clearance used $40 for both and both working fine now with no added investment but for a $15 used video card for the ASus board.

Three Pentium 4's total cost $38.00 out of thrift stores with one needing a replacement DVD-ROM I had on hand spare salvaged. One Lenovo Intel Core2 duo 8400 bought used 125.00 the now defunct geeks.com

New just no longer appeals when I can get it all done for pennies on the dollar.

All systems run Linux and the administrator of these apartments just got handed a $10.00 thrift store a decade old Pentium 4 Dell running Linux Mint 15 xfce from me that beats her brand new Dell i3 Celeron all in one Windows 8 with 4 Gig RAM machine running circles around it.

She needs to *get things done* and Windows 8 just didn't cut the mustard. Asked today two weeks after I gave it to her she said it's "fast" compared to the brand new Dell that sits now in the corner by the door.

It has 256 *meg* of RAM as opposed the the Windows machine with 4 Gig!

Now not to say her previous Windows experience was lame, it wasn't, Athlon

64 - 8 Gig RAM with Vista but that got snagged by upper management so no longer in play.

Monday I'll add another 256 RAM for no special reason but I've no longer any machines run ddr first gen. or those that do have more than sufficient RAM. As I've got to install Acrobat on it for her Monday anyway why not get rid of spare the RAM there?

Mint 15 BTW as I had trouble with Mint 16 Petra, perhaps the meeting between hardware and software but the same machines run w/o hangs on Mint

15 xfce that hanged on Petra.

She's just office use, I do some multimedia so my sweet spot is two Gig, RAM with Linux while she is actually happy with one eighth of that currently.

Even I was surprised that machine does as well as it does on so little.

I do tend to lean more heavily on the dual cores and when I spot one at the right price used or new a core2 quad for that old new stock board in the drawer.

But them I'm not into computer games where you really do need Windows and the latest and greatest bleeding edge dollar and killowatt burning machine.

Thanks.