Crappy Motherboards?

[cubby1223]

Reliable & compatible may be two very different words, but they both weigh just as evenly in an evaluation of a motherboard, and often times the two are confused for each other, like unreliability you might mistake as being incompatible parts and vice versa.

The big picture is if you buy a value board with a solid chipset (i.e. never purchase an SiS741GX board no matter who makes it) you're almost always going to get a stable board.


And about Amptron, I saw two of them a couple weeks ago, some early P4 boards. Of course the owner of the two machines was having a lot of problems getting them to run stable... So I still stand by my original statement - I never want to see any PC Chips or Amptron board ever again. But the other companies have some good model boards.

 

[Skyhack]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Why do people use them? I'm talking about companies like

Biostar
PC Chips
ECS
Chaintech
Shuttle

etc etc

I wouldnt mind if it were just the performance being low, but the reliability of them are just horrid

Why do people (me) use them?

Paying 2 college tuitions
Mortgage
2 car payments
Gas is 2 bucks a gallon
Milk is $4 a gallon
Natural gas bill for a month here in the frozen north is about $200
Paying car insurance on 4 cars (mine, my wife's and the two aforementioned college students)
Property taxes
And I could go on...

I bought one of the Fry's $39.99 combos (PCChips 811 and Duron 1.6) because I wanted to upgrade from a Pentium II 400 mhz which ran quite nicely for a long time. With the setup I have now, I surf the net, burn DVDs/CDs, game a little, and all of the other normal computing stuff...And all at the same time.

Yes, when the birds fly over my house, they may call, "Cheap! Cheap!" But it's all about priorities. We can't all be cutting edge.

 

[TRUMPHENT]

The answer. The target market for most of these manufacturers is not someone building one or two computers, it is for someone building hundreds or thousands of them. Those customers will use the compatible components to make them work properly. A stable configuration will be imaged and mass produced to the hard drives. That's the theory. The reseller/intergrator/computer box company has to make it work for a large build of systems.

The hobbyist doesn't make or break these companies. It hasn't been until recently that the mfrs have given attention to the hobbyist/gamer.

I had to buy a PC Chips socket 370 mainboard in an emergency, an M780. It was as reliable as the Tyan Tsunami it replaced (killed in an electrical storm). Overclocking wasn't allowed. It never crashed. PC Chips expects its customers to warranty the final product and I imagine it is an industry practice.

 

[Oyeve]

Hmm. Mw wonders why MSI aint on the top of his list.