Of the big four, who is the best for keeping updated bios?

[Compman55]

Of the big 4 Asus, Asrock , Gigabyte, & MSi, who offerers the best future proof support on their montherboards. For example when intel was in full force making their own boards, 2-3 years was the max. When Vista came out, a few bios mods is all it would have needed to be compatible, but they chose not to.

Mainly I am looking at BIOS support. This seems to be the #1 issue in using newer operating systems.

 

[Despoiler]

Asus had/has decent support for their high end boards. I think I got away with 5 years on my Crosshair 1 board. Although they should have had 1 more update to fully support the last chip the socket supported. That pissed a lot of people off including myself. I helped with a mod BIOS to update the microcode to the support that final chip. Keep in mind that AMD sockets don't change nearly as much as Intel's.

My Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 was frankly an atrocious board. Quirky the entire time I had it even though it was a $200+ enthusiast board. BIOS updates stopped as soon as they started working on UEFI. I just checked and it took them a full year to release their BETA UEFI BIOS that they said would be fully supported. That was over a year ago so they stopped working on z68 BIOS when Z77 hit. That is only 8 months of "stable" builds so if you want to count the beta then 1 year 9 months.

My current Asrock Z77 Extreme4 stopped getting BIOS updates when the next Intel socket and chipset released 1150/z87/Haswell. That is ~ 2 years of support.

 

[Compman55]

That is the kind of stuff I am talking about.

 

[richierich1212]

ASRock is pretty good.

 

[you2]

I have an asrock z68 which is approx 4 years old; and the last bios update (on their website) was July 2012. But that kind of makes sense since 1155 is pretty stable at this point (or that point). It claims to have support for windows 8 but since i run linux I have no real desire to find out.

 

[fleshconsumed]

My three Asrock Z87 Extreme4 motherboards has never really needed a BIOS update. They've been stable. The only reason I did BIOS update is to get 4790K support in case Microcenter decides to run a sale on those The only problem I had is one motherboard refused to detect BIOS update on a USB stick, I had to do the internet update instead and that worked just fine. Not sure why it wouldn't detect BIOS update on a stick.

However, back to the topic, Z87 boards did receive BIOS update to support 4790K, that's good enough for me.

 

[Kenmitch]

Two ways to look at it really. Company X gets it done correctly the 1st time with very little issues. They update infrequently with newer features/CPU support added. Company Y pretty much launches buggy and has frequent updates to fix it. If you look at company Y you may get the impression they have better support.

 

[jkauff]

I can't speak for the other manufacturers, but I've been using Asus boards since 2003 and always install the latest upgrades when they become available. I've never once had a botched update, and that reliability means a lot to me. I've read of other people having problems with a particular BIOS update, but I've never experienced that on any of my boards. I suspect that might be caused by jumping from a very old BIOS to the latest instead of installing them as they're released.