Most reliable/Highest quality AM2+ motherboard?

[shortylickens]

I am not ready to change everything yet so I will still be using an AM2+ setup. Anand hasnt done an AM2 review in a long time and all the reviews I find online focus on features and performance, not reliability. Back in the Socket 754 and 939 days I had DFI motherboards, and was generally happy with them. For some reason when I redid my office and gaming machine I used cheaper ECS boards. I forget what the logic was at the time. I guess I figured I was no longer an uber nerd and didnt need to spend lots of money on high end boards.
Now my attitude has changed and I think I may wanna go back to DFI. But I have been out of the loop for a while. I dont even know what the good chipsets are these days. Was hoping you guys could tell me what the most reliable boards are in the AM2+ arena.
This will be for my gaming machine so it only needs two SATA ports, two 240 pin slots, and a single PCIex16, holding a Radeon 4890. I will be using Windows XP Pro because most of the games I like are relatively old and don't wanna run in Windows 7 64. So the included drivers need to support it. EDIT: If my poor experience with ECS is any indication, I would like a company that includes full and proper XP chipset drivers with the board, or at least has a well-maintained website with updated drivers.

I am willing to spend 200 dollars on an enterprise class board, but I suspect that may not be required.
Was looking at Newegg and just going by the eggs it would seem Gigabyte and ASUS are the most recommended.

 

[tcsenter]

Chipset drivers are available from AMD.

 

[shortylickens]

Chipset drivers are available from AMD.

IF I get an AMD chipset.
Last one was VIA and they were a hassle. But thats a good point, if I get an AMD based chipset then thats one issue I wont have. Of course theres still proper onboard audio and LAN drivers, and yes I do use them. Got a Turtle Beach Voyreta and found its actually not any better than what can be found on good motherboards these days.

 

[mindless1]

Yes go with Asus or Gigabyte. I'd pick an ATI chipset with integrated video/HD-acceleration. You don't need the video now but it's handy to have if you redeploy the board for a new use the next time you upgrade your gaming rig.

Reliability is pretty good across their lines providing you don't get the cheapest thing they sell so you're getting solid capacitors, no tiny high RPM prone-to-fail chipset fan, support for more than the wattage CPU you plan to use (including increase in wattage if overclocking). For example you wouldn't want a Biostar board rated for 95W to use with an 80W CPU let alone 95W, especially when gaming since that puts a more continuous load on the CPU than an (office & email box, etc) would see.

With the prior things in mind I'd just head over to Newegg and plug your requirements into their Motherboard "Power Search" to see top candidates.

Differences in onboard audio - when using analog output - tend to depend on the input sensitivity of the next stage, the speaker amp or the high frequency response of the headphones. Personally I can hear the difference and prefer even ancient low-end PCI cards like a Soundblaster 128 or Vortex2 to typical onboard analog output, as the onboard has too much garbage noise in it. Loopback tests don't tend to show it so much because the issue comes when driving a load, even one as slight as the input impedance of a cheap PC speaker amp.

Lastly if you are budgeting up to $200 I am wondering if you might as well move up to a DDR3 board, for around $100 you can get something with USB3, sell your DDR2 memory and get some DDR3.

 

[nenforcer]

I assume you want to keep using your DDR2 memory which is why you want an AM2+ board?

The problem is DDR3 prices have come down as low or even lower than DDR2 now.

It really only makes sense to buy an AM3 board now which is backwards compatible.

Like mindless said you would be better of selling your DDR2 and buying AM3 / DDR3 for whichever platform you choose (AMD/nVidia).

 

[perdomot]

I'm currently running a Gigabyte 785G mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128394
Very good board and used a usb 3.0 card in the x1 slot above the vid card slot to provide next gen funtionality. Nice thing is that it leaves you plenty of money to get an SSD for your boot drive which will really cause performance to explode:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227393

 

[shortylickens]

OK, that just happened to be the Gigabyte I was eyeballing. I'm not too keen on micro boards. I like room and space and stuff. Especially on a gaming system it seems having a high end video card right next to a high end CPU makes for some lovely warmth. In the winter its appreciated but in the summer its annoying.

Went ahead and ordered it anyway. After a day of reading online I dont think I'm going to get much more info on AM2 boards.

 

[lopri]

Reliability (which I use with "longevity" interchangeably) is definitely a concern for users but not an easy task to tackle for reviews. I am not sure what a reviewer can do to predict long term (1+ years) reliability, other than doing some kind of follow-up, but unless a product is one of a kind thing such follow-up endeavors will require insurmount amount of men hours. I'm glad at least they do thorough torture testings.

Said that, most high-end AM2+ DDR2 boards have been disappearing and they are honestly no more reliable than cheaper boards unless overclocking is involved. Quality variance will occur at any price point unfortunately, and while high-end boards may have been built for higher sustained load it won't stop from a solder joint to melt and dry up, resulting in a loss of a functionality or such.

I'd have suggested my board (Gigabyte 790X-UD4P) which has been serving me over a year through 2 highly overclocked CPUs but that board isn't available any more. Even if it's available I'd not be comfortable recommending it an end-of-life product for obvious reasons. I think similarly to Perdomot that ASUS or Gigabyte's 785G mATX are probably the way to go for their popularity and known quality. They will not take your CPU to moon and performance might not be as sharp as high end boards/chipsets but as long as you keep them in a reasonable environment they should last.

 

[shortylickens]

Installed the Gigabyte a couple days ago. Aside from being too god damn small, it works great. The included disc had ALL the drivers I needed, and a utility to keep them up to date. And some other neat software. Good stuff.

 

[stevech]

I'm currently running a Gigabyte 785G mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128394
Very good board and used a usb 3.0 card in the x1 slot above the vid card slot to provide next gen funtionality. Nice thing is that it leaves you plenty of money to get an SSD for your boot drive which will really cause performance to explode:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227393

Been >very< pleased with the Western Digital SSD (64GB) I bought (newegg) about 3 months ago. I ran it at first with XP. Now Win 7. With XP, the drive supposedly has firmware that does not need TRIM or alternative. My second choice was the pricey Intel X25; but it didn't claim to run unaided on XP as did the WD drive.

Really love the fast boot time, fast restart from sleep, etc. I back it up often. The warranty is 3 years. Many of my heavily used magnetic disk drives, over the years, didn't last that long before a mechanical failure.

 

[jvroig]

Installed the Gigabyte a couple days ago. Aside from being too god damn small, it works great. The included disc had ALL the drivers I needed, and a utility to keep them up to date. And some other neat software. Good stuff.

That's the same board I bought 5 months ago when I was in the same boat as you. I wanted to upgrade my AM2 system, but wanted to reuse my 4 sticks of 1GB DDR2. The US2H had a bios update for the latest C3 Phenom II back then, and for a while now it also has support for Thuban procs.

If anybody else out there wanders on this thread looking to do the same thing, if you can get the Gigabyte 785GM US2H, I join the others in recommending this board.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have one of these boards too. It seems like a very good board, for a Matx 785G DDR2 board, at least.