? about mobo

[sodron]

i don't know if this has been ask before or not
being in the process of getting a new system, and trying to learn as much as i can.
i have 2 questions
1) how do you measure how stable or reabile a mobo or chipset, for me it seems you name any given mobo
or chipset half will say it's great the other half will say it's crap, i realize that yoiu are more likely to hear
from those who had problems then those who didn't
is how stable a system just a question of how far you can push a system before it crashes and if so does it
really make any difference what you get if you never push a system to it's limits

2) benchmarking
i really don't know much about benchmarking and how much to go by them.
it seem to me that benchmarking is the best performace you can possible get, but in the real world you may
never get that performace


my system runs at about 400 mhz so anything is an improvment, all i really want is a system that
boots up every time and can run basiclly anything out there

 

[whalen]

1) You often hear different opinions because, obviously, people will be using different configurations and different components. Due to this, systems will react differently for almost everyone. A good indicator of a problem chipset or motherboard is hearing a consistant problem. For example, the recent problems with the Epox 8kha+. Alot of people that got it to work love it, but there are undeniably a ton of people that have the same problem.

Stability generally refers to how reliable a computer is at default settings. If I have a computer overclocked, I don't blame a crash on the chipset being weak or the motherboard being of poor quality...

2) Benchmarking can be very useful to interpret how a component or system compares to other similar components or systems. For instance, Quake III has been used to measure performance of motherboards and video cards for a long time, and gives a good, real world example of performance in a games.