Question Gigabyte motherboard, are they really durable or reliable?

[Puffnstuff]

ECS Eurone....I used them once but the board worked without issue. I was looking at Newegg but I too remember's GN's expose on them, repeated offenses in fact that scare me away from buying there.

In years past when they were the king of pc parts I spent thousands of dollars over a great many years there but nowadays I don't trust them as far as I can throw them.

I've had great motherboards from Asus, Abit and DFI and was greatly saddened when the later two went out of business. One thing that I will never do again is buy another Enermax power supply.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Today I looked at the Gigabyte Z790 AORUS XTREME and it looks like a really sweet board and only Newegg has it at msrp. My Asus is still on order at Amazon but I'm so tempted to buy the extreme and cancel the ROG but I don't trust them enough to drop 8 bills plus tax with them.

 

[Sick Willie]

Today I looked at the Gigabyte Z790 AORUS XTREME and it looks like a really sweet board and only Newegg has it at msrp. My Asus is still on order at Amazon but I'm so tempted to buy the extreme and cancel the ROG but I don't trust them enough to drop 8 bills plus tax with them.

I spend a lot of money @ newegg and have had no problems in 20+ years. Generally, I just make sure that the items are sold and shipped by newegg. I've occasionally broken this rule, but rarely. But, I don't buy Gigabyte boards.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I spend a lot of money @ newegg and have had no problems in 20+ years. Generally, I just make sure that the items are sold and shipped by newegg. I've occasionally broken this rule, but rarely. But, I don't buy Gigabyte boards.

Yeah me to, I was buying pc parts from them when Amazon was selling books and cd's. I didn't cancel my Amazon mb order as I had to keep reminding myself about my experience with my current Gigabyte board.

Last night I could've had the MSI store 4090 bundle for 2.5k that made you buy their z790 carbon mb and a 280 aio to get the gpu but I declined. Once I let the guys on the tracker chat know it was there it was gone in no time.

 

[Soulkeeper]

I've had 4 gigabyte boards since my favorite board maker Abit went out of business.
One of them failed, but to be fair it was a budget board and I think a faulty psu caused it (gigabyte still replaced/repaired it).
The other ones were highend boards and were rock solid.
I've also had Asus, msi, supermicro, and Asrock boards. Out of those only the Asrock had issues (fried vrm).

I'd say they are on par with asus and msi, although msi seems to have stepped up their game recently from what i've been hearing.
Also worth noting is that Gigabyte is the only board make who still makes boards in Taiwan, all the others have shifted all production to mainland china I believe. There is a video for their taiwan factory tour showing all the women placing the parts. Their lower end budget boards are made in china I believe.

 

[BoomerD]

I'm getting closer to ordering parts for a system refresh. Most likely will be the i5-13600k, but there are some decent deals to be had for the i7-12700k and i9-12900k processors as well.
As for motherboards...I've NEVER built with Gigabyte or :shudder: MSI. As I remember, way back in the days before time (pre- 2000?)...MSI was a near junk brand with constant problems. Maybe it was just their low-end stuff...don't remember.

I've been leaning towards the ASUS ROG Strix Z690-A wiFi D4 or the Z790 version if the same board, but am also considering the Gigabyte Z690 AORUS ELITE AX DDR4 or the Z790 version of that one as well.

I'm not averse to a good MSI board...but am still skeptical about their quality.

I believe the Z690 boards will need a BIOS flash to run the 13th gen. processors...but that should be easy with BIOS flashback nowadays.

opinions? Recommendations? Other GOOD boards to consider? (nope...budget won't allow me to even consider the ASUS ROG Maximus series of boards...nor the MSI GODLIKE boards...and if possible, I'd like to stick with DDR4 Since I have a pair of Corsair 16 gb DDR4-3200 sticks to use. ( not buying DDR5 would save me $150 or more)


thanks.

 

[Tech Junky]

@BoomerD

I built a version of my 8700K with an MSI along with a couple of others but, MSI did just as well as the other options I used.

For performance per dollar though it's ASRock in my book. I've now used 3? of them w/o any issues.

Yes, 690's just need a BIOS/UEFI flash to enable RPL. Some boards make it easier while others require dropping in an ADL CPU to make it happen. ASR will let you just plug in your USB drive into the special USB port and do whatever you want.

The only difference besides price with the ADL/RPL 700/900's is more E cores and a slight boost to the sped. Other than that it's a wash. If going ADL saves you a couple hundred you won't be missing anything.

 

[igor_kavinski]

opinions? Recommendations?

I think you should go for the ASROCK Z690 Extreme. You can save $50 going with this: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162039

 

[igor_kavinski]

This one has good onboard audio, if you can accept B660: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813145373

 

[QueBert]

a long history of using many brands. Including Asus, DFI, EPoX, ABIT, Soltek, BIOSTAR, Shuttle, ECS, SOYO, FIC, Intel, SuperMicro, Foxconn, and probably more. That's not counting the bad caps epoch when multiple brands failed me.

Gigabyte has been one of the few brands that hasn't failed on me yet.

Maybe this is just my fond memories of those days clouding my head. But I wish DFI still made boards. I loved my Lanparty so much, they were way ahead of the game when it came to making flashy motherboards. I remember it being a pretty sweet board. I miss ABIT too, although I just had 1 board from them so I don't know how good they actually were. Obviously not great if they went bankrupt I suppose lol. I also miss Sapphire boards, they made white Athlon XP boards where the PCB's were actually white.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Maybe this is just my fond memories of those days clouding my head. But I wish DFI still made boards. I loved my Lanparty so much, they were way ahead of the game when it came to making flashy motherboards. I remember it being a pretty sweet board. I miss ABIT too, although I just had 1 board from them so I don't know how good they actually were. Obviously not great if they went bankrupt I suppose lol. I also miss Sapphire boards, they made white Athlon XP boards where the PCB's were actually white.

DFI recruited one of the top engineers from ABIT which explains why they became the overclocker's choice for a few years. My LANParty boards were great, and I have nothing but great things to say about the ABIT boards I used.

I have read someone here complain about their LANParty, but I think that was probably a bad batch, or simply chipset related. I moderated at NforcersHQ and the Nforce chipsets had a laundry list of bugs and issues constantly being reported. Most of our staff was doing closed beta testing, and there was never a lack of bug reports or software issues. VIA was often problematic, and AMD had a rough start. Intel chipsets were the gold standard for stability and reliability IMO. I may be misremembering, so I will rely on Cunningham's Law here.

Back to Gigabyte; The only issue so far wasn't their fault. Windows decided to replace my AMD/MediaTek wifi drivers with the Intel version. Downloading and installing the driver from Gigabyte resolved it quickly.

 

[igor_kavinski]

VIA was often problematic, and AMD had a rough start. Intel chipsets were the gold standard for stability and reliability IMO. I may be misremembering, so I will rely on Cunningham's Law here.

Nah. It was like you remember. You got VIA only if you couldn't afford anything better.

Saw Nforce4 with P4 in an office PC. Don't remember it having any showstopping issues.

 

[lopri]

@BoomerD

Yes, 690's just need a BIOS/UEFI flash to enable RPL RTL

Oh and I miss DFI, too. What a blast their NF3/NF4 series were. Check out AT's review by Wesley Pink at the time and how excited he was. It is a rare thing indeed for motherboards to bring out such genuine emotion. I still have that Socket 939 board somewhere in the storage, along with an Opteron 165 which clocks to 3.2 GHz. (100% OC)

DFI nForce4: SLI and Ultra for Mad Overclockers

www.anandtech.com

I believe the name of the legendary engineer behind DFI back then is Oscar Wu. I wonder what exactly happened to DFI and Wu. They were at their prime before suddenly disappearing.

 

[Tech Junky]

@lopri

RPL RTL

RPL = Raptor Lake
RTL = RealTek

 

[lopri]

I thought RTL = Raptor Lake, RPL = Raphael

I suppose it depends on the context. XD

 

[Tech Junky]

Raphael is a GPU not CPU

 

[Sick Willie]

Raphael is a GPU not CPU

 

[Tech Junky]

I knew it was AMD related but, sure. It's a CPU in the AMD world. RPL though in Intel speak is Raptor Lake.

to/too/two sort of deal.. they all sound the same but mean different things.

 

[Khanan]

If you pay more you get more. My good experience with Gigabyte was with a AM2+ mainboard back then which would never crap out on me and just work flawlessly, even did a Triple Crossfire setup without complaining for one day. Mainboard was about 100€

 

[Sulaco]

I'm of the opinion that the few remaining board makers are all within a stone's throw of each other. It comes down to pricing and feature set at the end of the day.

So many of us started this hobby back in the day when there were something like 20 different brands out there and there were actual quality differences between makers and boards. In my time personally, I've owned DFI, Biostar, Abit, Chaintech, Epox, Asus, and Gigabyte. Ironically, the only one that I can recall that was DOA was the Aus. Now, I know if I went back to the store and bought 5 more of those same boards, the overwhelming likelihood is they would all work flawlessly, I just got very unlucky. But unless you're working for a tech site or you have just a TON of time and money on your hands to own and play with multiple boards a month, our experiences are pretty limited.
For what its worth, I've been using Gigabyte since about 2014 and have had excellent results. My next board will be here this week for my 13900k, and it's the Gigabyte Aorus z790 Elite; on sale at my local MC for $240. I'll post m y thoughts once it's all built and working.

Long story short though, I'd just figure out a price range/feature set you're pretty firm on and then research individual boards that fit that for you and see what people/tech review sites/youtube "experts" are saying and don't worry about preconceived ideas of "quality boards" that are liekly tainted (for most of us) from building experiences 15 years ago.

 

[CP5670]

One thing I noticed with MSI is they have very few midrange $200-500 AM5 boards. I like their bios and software but there is only one board with PCIE 5, the $480 X670E Carbon board which is quite overpriced for a midrange model. Asus has much better options in this range.

Oh and I miss DFI, too. What a blast their NF3/NF4 series were. Check out AT's review by Wesley Pink at the time and how excited he was. It is a rare thing indeed for motherboards to bring out such genuine emotion. I still have that Socket 939 board somewhere in the storage, along with an Opteron 165 which clocks to 3.2 GHz. (100% OC)

Same here, have the exact same board and CPU that I never got around to selling. I think mine went to 3ghz.