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Technology Hardware

3-Way Motherboard Shootout 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hard-look-at-hardware dept.
Steve writes "Hexus.net has put three high-end i955X-based motherboards through their paces, to see which is the best LGA775 platform motherboard. Intel's own offering falls a little short, but Gigabyte and ABIT both make compelling boards, with ABIT taking the top-spot by a small margin."
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3-Way Motherboard Shootout More

3-Way Motherboard Shootout

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  • No guns were found (Score:5, Funny)

    by prurientknave ( 820507 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:12AM (#13593457)
    The test ended rather abruptly when it was found the motherboards were not equipped with guns as ordered.


    Move along. Nothing to see here folks.
    • LOL, If I had mod points I'd mod this up to 5 as funny, but I don't :P
    • The test ended rather abruptly when it was found the motherboards were not equipped with guns as ordered.

      However, a lascivious motherboard menage a trois ensued when an enterprising hacker introduced the "Hot Silicon" mod. Senator Clinton is investigating.

  • three way (Score:5, Funny)

    by DavidLeeRoth ( 865433 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:19AM (#13593487)
    it would have been even more embarrassing if the article was called "Threesome Motherboard shootout."
    • Thanks for the idea, always looking for something new and exciting.
    • Well, it might just be me, but I don't want to think about a "Threesome ... Shootout" but that's just me.
    • I was thinking "3-way"... as in 2-way or 4-way... and going nuts trying to envision a board with 3 processors... ;)

      arg...

      Good to see ABIT's still knocking them down. I've been away from building with Abit for a long time. Though my first board, a KT100, is still ticken quite well.

      I've been building asus or gigabyte for desktops and workstations and tyan for everything else.

      Still would like to see multiway boards someday. As in, mix and match processor boards. With dual core it's getting closer... but not cl

      • Re:three way (Score:3, Informative)

        by rainman_bc ( 735332 )
        Odd, a friend of mine bought a Gigabyte board and had some serious issues with a bad production run.

        After a couple weeks and lots of trouble with his machine, he found his board was missing a capacitor next to the processor that later versions had. No mention of the problem on Gigabyte's web site, some guy on a forum found it by comparing an earlier run with a later run to find the missing capacitor. They were good to repair it, but they covered it up pretty good too..

        I'm not a huge fan of Gigabyte. Hone

  • What about quality? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:26AM (#13593514)
    How is the quality of these boards? Will they still be working in two or three years? Or will they have leaking capacitors by that time?

    • How is the quality of these boards? Will they still be working in two or three years? Or will they have leaking capacitors by that time?

      You want to know if they'll still be working in two or three years time? Ok, let me just take a short trip in my time machine so I can find out.

      Oh wait...

    • Generally Satisfied with ABIT Quality (Score:4, Informative)

      by dsci ( 658278 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @02:03AM (#13593893) Homepage
      While I don't have experience with these particular boards, I've have had very good luck with two ABIT models:

      KT7E and KX7-333R

      The KT7E has been running virtually non-stop for 4 or 5 years; the KX7 likewise about three years. Both have been used constantly for their service life running floating point, number crunching code.

      Both boards have withstood cpu fan failures and powersupply failures; replacement of the faulty components and they're up-n-runnin'.

      I'd recommend ABIT to anybody with the caveat that I did have some problems with the KX7 until a bios update was done. Since then..no problem.

      Though I have to admit, my newer systems are ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxes with Athlon 64 X2's. ;)
      • My KT7 stopped working the other day. As soon as you boot the alarm screams at you non-stop, even though nothing is wrong in the health section of the BIOS. And it locks up after about 30 seconds of being on, even when you are just sitting in the BIOS watching the seconds tick by.

        Their support of course says "check the CPU temp" and calls it a day. Despite me clearly telling them everything is fine in the PC health section of the BIOS, and that I had swapped out RAM, CPU and video card to make certain it
    • My crystal ball says... "try again later!" :-(

  • I prefer the Gigabyte (Score:4, Insightful)

    by StarHeart ( 27290 ) * on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:34AM (#13593547)
    Even if the Abit has a slight performance lead, I like all the features on the Gigabyte more. It is nice to see two pata connectors instead of just one like the other two boards. It also has more PCI slots than the Abit.

  • high end? (Score:2, Informative)

    by vbrtrmn ( 62760 )
    Wow, no SLi on any of them, I'll stick with my ASUS for now.

    • Re:high end? (Score:3, Informative)

      by KillShill ( 877105 )
      well thankfully SLi is a useless feature except for the most hardcore gfx enthusiasts.

      i consider myself a gfx groupie but i wouldn't touch SLi with a 256ft pole. too much expense for too little return. gfx technology is moving too fast for SLI to become viable to more than a very small set of people.

      you're also looking at extra cost in electricity in running 2 gfx cards. extra juice from the PSU is also required; meaning a more beefier unit which most people lack. it also takes up 2-4 slots total depending
      • if someone can find another reason to buy a motherboard with an extra high speed PCI-e slot... that's another story though.

        I did.

        I'm running ASUS A8N-SLI's with Athon 64 X2's on board in a small cluster. I'm not using the SLI feature.

        I got these boards because:

        1. ASUS performance is solid with the dual core Athlon 64.
        2. Dual GbE on-board; no purchase of second NIC to use as headless cluster.

        I can tie one NIC into my existing LAN and keep the other for the dedicated cluster interconnect. I
      • SLI would be attractive if I could use several lower-end cards to achieve a decent performance without the heat and noise issues. Unfortunately it's only aimed at the very high-end at the moment.
        • I'm waiting for SLi to work with my bunch of old Tseng ET4000 myself.
          If I could have twice that 1024x768 goodness in 256 colours, it would be just great. I might even get a 487 to go with it!

  • Avoid Abit High Ends (Score:5, Informative)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:50AM (#13593621)
    I used to think brands really didn't matter. Until I bought the Abit Ka7-100. It was a highend board back around 2000 with 4 Dimm slots and 6 PCIs, 1 AGP. And an ISA slot which could be used when sacrificing the last PCI slot. It was fantastic at the time.

    Then the transistors fried. I paid for shipping etc and got a replacement. Then it fried again, replaced, then fried again. 4 years later Abit sends me a letter saying they lost a lawsuit for selling select board models with broken transistors including the Ka7-100. Basically they knew it, and told consumers nothing about it.

    • I'll stick to performance reviews, its all a bit dice toss in reality and if you expected more from a publically held company you should reconsider.

      There are no saints here.
    • I agree. They look great on paper, but they aren't worth it.

      Way back I had the Abit dual Celeron board. Worked fine except for the horrible Ultra66 controller that was one of my biggest reasons for buying it.

      Bought a k7a something or other, that died shortly.

      Bought one of their first Nvidia chipset boards. Returned one DOA, one died within a day, tried one more DOA board and gave up.

      Had one of their Max legacy free P4 boards. That lasted a few months.

      No more Abit for me, thanks.

    • those were very likely capacitors (Score:4, Informative)

      by YesIAmAScript ( 886271 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @02:14AM (#13593930)
      Not transistors.

      And honestly, many mobo companies had problems with this at that time. There was a company making knockoff capacitors that appears to be high quality components. Many good mobo makers got taken by this. It was covered on slashdot.

      I personally won't buy Abit again if I can avoid it, for different reasons. My high end from them is still working, but I had significant problems in the beginning and minor problem all along, and they just never even responded to my queries on their forums.

  • Faster, higher, stronger? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:52AM (#13593628)
    Yes, we get it. You guys can build big motherboards with gobs of features, including legacy stuff I'll never use.

    For once, I'd like to see somebody build a small motherboard with modern connectors, quiet (or no) fans, and no legacy crap that just takes up space. Right now, about the only way to get that is out of a Mac mini.

    I'm still using a 5-year-old computer that I've only upgraded once (bought a new 80 GB disk to replace the old 9 GB one). It's still fast enough for everything I do -- if/when I upgrade, I hope to get something smaller and quieter. I don't care about faster, because the slowest new computer available is faster than this sub-GHz Athlon.

    It's kind of sad that, over the past 10 years, the only thing that's really changed about motherboards is that they've gotten faster. They've gone to all the work to come up with new and faster and smaller busses (Firewire, USB2, S-ATA, etc.), but it doesn't make the boards any smaller if they're still including all the big old legacy ports, still, too!

    (Yay, floppy, IDE, and PCI slots! What, no ISA?)

    ISTM that all motherboard manufacturers today build pretty much the same product, which is aimed at ... everybody, which means "nobody in particular". This is a market ripe for picking. If somebody had the brains and balls, they could really make a killing. How about a Mac mini-like motherboard?
    • but can it run linux? Oh wait...
    • I was going to write about PCI express, and how cheap legacy connecters were, and then I realized you were a prime canidate for legacy connectors, and then ISA?? Top it of with Anon. Coward and it's a guaranteed troll. My hat to you sir.
      • it's probably not a troll. just another user lacking insightful knowledge in the right context. it's not that legacy components are good but in his case he has no right to complain. a sub-ghz athlon, just upgraded his 9GB hd?

        seems like by the time he gets around to upgrading his computer, Terabit ethernet would be long forgotten.
    • There's been stuff out there for several years now.

      A lot of the "small form factor" barebone cases by Shuttle [shuttle.com], Biostar [biostar-usa.com], Soltek [soltek.com.tw], etc. might fit your spec.

      Most of those cases are still at least four times bigger than a Mac Mini to accomodate full-size AGP/PCI-Express/PCI cards and 3.5" and 5.25" bays but then they are probably four times smaller than a regular PC tower. Price-wise they are somewhat more expensive than a DIY PC.

      But yes, someone has thought of this.
    • Why would motherboard maker remove stuff that people still use? There are smaller motherboards out there, but you're paying more for less. And these boards are made for smaller cases that are harder to cool. I just don't see a point to less features motherboards.

      Economy of scale means you're getting these things for 'free'. And someday when your SATA drive goes pop you may just need to grab an old IDE drive from the back closet.

    • Re:Faster, higher, stronger? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:15AM (#13593715) Homepage Journal
      I think you've somehow missed the chatter about the miniITX boards?
    • There are plenty of board to meet that request, most very small, inexpensive, and with soldered in CPUs.
    • I totally agree, I have two legacy boards both AMD and both Slot A. Still going and going strong. 1 is running XP Pro and the other SLOWER board is running Windows Server 2003.
    • Maybe you should take a look at one of these:

      VIA EPIA SP13000 Mini-ITX Motherboard [epiacenter.com].

      "To Summarise: The EPIA-SP 13000 is an important update to the VIA EPIA range improving the 3D graphics performance of the system. ... this is the best VIA EPIA system yet - highly capable as an office machine, or entertainment platform, even capable of the odd game or two. The compact size means it's suitable for a variety of systems, a compact cube case, or a custom solution. The extremely reliable system allows you to

      • If I wanted a mini-ITX board, I'd use a Socket 479 Pentium M or even a Socket 478 board. The EPIA chip is definitely not very powerful- my old 2.2-M Northwood benchmarks well above it and it gets its tail handed to it by modern CPUs. But for a HTPC or something, it would suffice. The whole SFF computer thing is pretty neat as I don't really *need* a huge full-tower setup with six 5.25" bays, three floppy bays, and 4-6 HDD bays when I would have one floppy, one or two HDDs, and one or two opticals.
    • ISTM that all motherboard manufacturers today build pretty much the same product, which is aimed at ... everybody, which means "nobody in particular". This is a market ripe for picking.

      In many cases, it costs more to design a separate 'barebones' mobo than it does to include the same components as a standard/midrange mobo. For an example from the last few years, even if only a few percent of the market wants an ISA slot, the additional sales more than cover the cost of the additional components on the enti
  • Steve writes "Hexus.net has set three high-end i955X-based motherboards against each other, to see which is the best LGA775 platform motherboard. Intel's own offering fell after taking a shot to the head, but Gigabyte and ABIT both survived for hours, with ABIT taking out Gigabyte by dropping his gun and strangling him to death. Police are still investigating the cause of the shootout and Hexus' motive in provoking it."

  • pssst.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KillShill ( 877105 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:08AM (#13593684)
    these motherboards contain intel's DRM technology.

    pass it on.

    http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2449 [anandtech.com]

    search for DRM in the above site for confirmation and some extra info.

  • Why can't they link directly to this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mechcozmo ( 871146 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:09AM (#13593687)
    http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNjAw [hexus.net]

    Printer friendly version for everyone so that this (click, load ads) doesn't (click, load ads) happen (click, load ads) to (click, load ads) you (click, load ads).

  • The most important thing... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:10AM (#13593690)
    Only one thing matters. Warranty.
    As a Genuine Intel Dealer, I can expect a replacement board to be overnighted even before I send the faulty one back. That way there is minimum disruption to the customer.
    Try telling a customer their server is down for a few weeks while you wait for the board to be shipped back to Taiwan/China for testing before they'll issue a replacement.

    Had a few customers who got non-Intel boards and had no computer for up to three months while waiting for a replacement. Think about that. That's three months paying for broadband you can't use for some people. The inconvenience cost adds up pretty quickly. Kinda makes a 5% increase in motherboard performance seem pretty irrelevant.

    And Intel has a good history of actually fixing mistakes. FDIV bug -> replaced processors. VC820 SDRAM bug -> new board and free RDRAM RIMM.

    Oh well. I'll stop ranting but hopefully you get my point.
    • Well I had a problem with a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard recently, and had it RMA'd to Gigabyte headquarters in Southern California. I just drove over there and dropped off the board since they were pretty close. I even talked to the engineer that was in charge. They called me later saying they couldn't fix the problem with the board, but since they didn't have any more boards with an 875P chipset, I could pick any motherboard they currently sell. Guess what, I picked the GA-8I955X, and I'm running it now
    • As a Genuine Intel Dealer

      I kiss major ass?

      Seriously, would someone like to help me count the number of Intel pooch-screws? As I recall they have released a few products that weren't quite up to snuff...

      And I would have to agree with another poster, no real trouble with those "evil" Taiwanese board makers, cause they all have US headquarters. Check with Intel, I would personally be shocked if they don't make or get their boards from Taiwan.

      free RDRAM RIMM

      Lets avoid RDRAM, it sort of answers part of my qu
    • Only one thing matters. Warranty.

      Maybe to Americans. In a lot of other civilized countries the consumer protection laws are good enough that warranties are completely irrelvant.

      Let's take Norway as an example. You have trough law 2 years warranty, 5 years on capital goods that are meant to last significantly more than 2 years. Probably motherboards would fall under this category, but even if not, 2 years is decent for electronics.

      If something happens in this period, excluding normal wear and consumer

    • FDIV bug

      You mean the one they initially didn't want to fix [mackido.com] unless you could somehow prove that it might affect you? I'd be hard pressed to think of a worse example of this magical Intel warranty support you're so proud of.

      They may indeed be better now; if so, then you should have picked a case that didn't make people hate them.

  • ...Leaves 2 hard drives dead and one CD-ROM drive wounded.

  • ECC Memory support is extremely important... (Score:4, Informative)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:28AM (#13593767) Homepage
    and that's why I got a D955XBK in my new dual-core P4 Extreme system. It's amazing how 99% of desktop computer users have NO IDEA if their memory flips a bit every now and then (let alone correcting it!). The Intel MOBO supports ECC memory.
    • What exactly does ECC Memory Do? (I am a computer nerd, so complete laymans term aren't neccesary), I would consider myself an enthusiast, I do a lot of video encoding/graphics work/etc, so what will ECC Do for me?
      • ECC [wikipedia.org]

        Some systems require high reliability (e.g. servers), or are in high-radiation environments where this happens more often (e.g. satellites). Those systems deal with this problem by using special DRAM modules that include extra memory bits - ECC-capable memory controllers can then use error detection functions to detect when it happens, and possibly ECC functions to narrow down exactly which bit was in error and correct it. Error-correction functions in PCs can typically detect, and correct errors of a

    • Personally, I wouldn't take advice off someone who wastes their money on a dual-core P4 EE.

      The high latency of ECC memory together with a P4EE with is like driving a sports car with an anchor tied to the back. Except the P4EE isn't much of a sports car compared to AMD's dual core offerings.
    • So you're the guy who bought the P4EE chip, I was wondering who you were!
    • AnandTech claims that most memory errors are due to bad power. So it it isn't critical, get a decent power supply and you can skip the ECC.

      The driving theory behind ECC memory is that it corrects errors that occur in memory. Perhaps a transistor is faulty and flipped for the wrong reason, or a faint electrical signal pulled a transistor into the incorrect position. While researching this review and others, we have noticed the largest factor for incorrect memory blocks is faulty power supplies.

      http: [anandtech.com]
    • Eh, unless your memory, power supply, or memory controller are marginal flipped bits are pretty damn rare. They do exist, I used to work for a place that had 50+ SGI Challenge XLs loaded to the gills with memory. We had to write special filters in the log watcher to filter out "Single bit parity error" messages, because there would be several of them per day. However, this was over thousands of memory sticks. On the one or two sticks you have in your PC, it's almost unheard of. You're far more likely t
    • Now that's just not true. I know for a fact that Windows users are informed when their system "flips a bit now and then." The famed BSOD makes an appearance.

  • That Hexus site... (Score:4, Funny)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:40AM (#13593803) Homepage
    That Hexus [jerkcity.com] site is one of the [wikipedia.com] most anoying [rosie.com] I've ever seen. Every other word [lesbian.com] is highlighted with a sponsored link [nih.gov] that's often not related at all to the subject at hand [robert.to]. It seems to me [hofstra.edu] that the whole point [stpt.com] of that site is to have mildly-useful content [my-penis.org] simply as click fodder. [nytimes.com]

  • Still the old standards... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Monday September 19, 2005 @01:40AM (#13593804) Homepage
    Abit, gigabyte and intel? Sorry, theres a new highend standard, especially for overclockers. If you havn't heard of DFI, they have some kickass boards, loads of features, and rock solid. I guess they have a dozen s775 mobos, and im sure they'll have i955 chipset boards soon.
  • For getting it's act together. I built up 10 P4 systems each with Abit AI7 motherboards. They all worked flawlessly... except for the bullshit Northbridge fan. I had to replace every one of them.

    Nice to see that Abit figured out a fix with the heatpipe system on the Northbridge chip and this board.

  • What I got out of it... (Score:2, Informative)

    by ender- ( 42944 )
    So basically what I got out of that article is that the performance of all three boards using default settings were almost exactly the same, and that unless I'm using Microsoft Movie Maker, a 2.4Ghz Athlon64 kicks the crap out of the 3.6Ghz P4 Systems with this new chipset.

    Yup, I for one am glad that I went with an Athlon 64 over a P4.

  • Errr... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by HaydnH ( 877214 )
    From the article: "Having to replace a motherboard usually necessitates a long-winded process of reinstalling an OS, programs, and personal data."

    Since when has swapping a motherboard forced me to format my hard disks???
    • Never did it with Win9x, huh?

  • Abit motherboards and temperature monitoring (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Abit motherboards are infamous for reporting incorrect temperatures. I like their motherboard features but I will never buy another Abit board because the usefulness of their temperature monitoring software is greatly reduced when load temperatures are 15 degrees celcius than actual. Most motherboards give inaccurate temperature readings but Abit is the worst that I have seen.
  • ...for actually
    • providing a useful summary
    • not overlinking
    • and not ending the post with an obvious slashdot-standard troll, like "Does this mean the end for Intel's waning mobo business?"

    A refreshing change.

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