What's your favourite motherboard ever?

s3thra

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My fondest memories of a motherboard is from the first one I ever bought for my very first custom rig, the Abit IS7 using the i865PE chipset back at the end of 2003.

IS7_pic6.jpg

I remember being able to overclock my 2.6GHz Northwood Pentium 4 all the way up to 3.25GHz by pushing the FSB up to 250MHz from the stock 200MHz, and wowee it managed to run like this for years with no problems.

Even the fan on the Northbridge stopped spinning after a couple of years, but everything stayed stable after that too.

Things inevitably deteriorated after years of heavy use, and I think the only thing I might have left of it now is the manual, but my nostalgia lives on when I think of this board.
 
This one is very easy for me. Intel's D5400XS Skulltrail. It was absolutely ridiculous for its time and I ran with that thing virtually problem free for several years. When I had three GTX 280's in it in 3-Way SLI the thing pulled over 900 watts at the wall.
 
Hmmm, good question.
My first motherboard was rock solid and let me OC a Athlon XP 2200+ Tbred-B up pretty damned high. I'm sure if I logged into the 3D Mark database, it would still have my clocks.
My favorite board though, would have to be the DFI LANparty nf4 board I had for the Athlon 64. UV lighting was all the rage back then, and that board had plenty of reaction
Best OC board was an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe. I had a Pentium D 820 that I got a +1GHz OC on, and it ran 24/7 like that for years, under a Zalman air cooler. It was replaced by a Phenom II X6 1045T. I ran that D for a long long time, lol.
 
So many come to mind. For older boards I would go with my Abit NF7. Still have my DFI LAN Party P45 board with a Q6600 sitting here also.
 
Abit vp6. Loved that board. I found it's little brother in storage recently. A bp 6 with the Celerons still in it
 
keljian said:
The Gigabyte K8NS-Pro https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-K8NS-Pro-rev-1x#ov

It was the budget board for overclocking at the time. It doesn't compare with the new stuff in terms of overkill VRMs and style (it's kind of kiddy) but it was a lot of board for the money, and it was well supported.
Click to expand...

I believe I had one of those as well. Got me hooked on Gigabyte boards and have stuck with them ever since right after Abit folded.
 
A vote for the Abit BP6, that was a fun build.
 
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Niner51 said:
I believe I had one of those as well. Got me hooked on Gigabyte boards and have stuck with them ever since right after Abit folded.
Click to expand...

It is probably one of the reasons I currently have a gigabyte board now too :)
 
Abit I do not remember the model number but i had 2 athlon 4800 in it
 
Fav is hard to pick but I also have to go Abit. NF7-S for the nostalgia and that Nforce chipset. First CPU I ever OC'd was on that board and you never forget your first ;). One of the Barton Athlons I believe. I change builds a ton so never keep anything too long to get as attached as I was to that board. Rolled it in a side box for years till a cap blew.

Close second is my first ever custom build on an FIC OEM mobo with a Slot A Athlon 600. Only because that is where my custom building journey began--- that board was a freaking mess...lol
 
My favorite is probably the DFI Lanparty nForce2 Ultra-b. I had quite a bit of fun getting my Barton 2400+ mobile to 2.4Ghz and stable. Sadly, I don't think I got more than a year before the board died on me out of the blue. It was odd, for a year or so it worked perfectly and then one day it wouldn't fire back up. That forced me to go back to my Asus A7N8x-dlx board which would only run the Barton at 2.3Ghz stable.

I think that DFI was also the most money I've ever spent on a motherboard and it was around $140 or $150.
 
GA-EX58-UD5
1053_m.jpg

I paired this bad boy with a i7 950 OC by 600MHZ, and a ATI Radeon 7970 XFX Model, 12GB of Ram and some random sound blaster card.
 
The one that wowed me the most was my first NForce with DD surround sound over spdif/optical.
At that time the only way to get surround was using a proprietary Creative solution with none standard connections and a none standard soundcard.
I had one that used 3 spdif channels in one connector to a break out box with the amplifier going to cheap satellite speakers.
What I really wanted was a way to connect my Sony AVR to my PC with surround.

The NForce chipset gave me exactly this, I could finally use my living room sound system for gaming and what a change it made!
It worked without complication too.
That ancient Sony AVR is still in use in a basement room.
 
ASUS CUSL2-C. I overclocked my P III 800Mhz to 1001. All on air using a Thermalright copper HSF. I can't remember which one it was.
 
Mine is more recent, the Asus Sabertooth 990FX. I liked that it was built like a tank but with few frills or features so it was a more reasonable price... $180'ish IIRC. I beat the ever luvin' crap out of that thing. Overclocked a FX-8150 with easily a hundred plus hours of stability tests on OCCT, Prime95 and IBT.... Then overclocked a 8350 to 4.8 and put it thru as many torture tests. Couldn't count the number of crashes, BIOS resets and BSOD's I got and that board never so much as flinched and was still working perfectly when I swapped it out a year ago.
 
I don't have a favourite motherboard, I always find things I don't like with even the best of them.

But I do have some good ones laying around. The usual Abit NF7-S and Abit BP6, if you're that old you just have to have those. :D

More of a really special case: Asus P2L97-DS. Dual slot Pentium II motherboard, nobody else I know had one of these. :eek:

Pentium III and 4 era was void of anything interesting in my case. As far as I can remember anyway.

Used another Abit for the Athlon X2 craze iirc.

The last decade I've used numerous Asus ROG motherboards in combination with Intel cpus.

And sometime next year it's time to get onboard the ZEN train. Who knows what kind of motherboard I'll get then!?
 
For me, at the moment, it's the UD3 X79 in my sig. Not the prettiest. Not the best. By far the most configurable I've had yet. At one point 3 GPU's(2xSLI, 1 PhysX), 3 hardware based RAID's, and the first board I had that let me have 40 PCIe lanes. It's clunky by enthusiast standards but get's the job done. Doesn't hurt that back in the day I got a great BF deal on it for ~$400 with the 4930k.

Presently the new x570 in my sig is doing well and worked pretty flawlessly for the PCIe 4.0 SSD, 3600Mhz ram, and letting the 3700x do its thing at 4250-4325Mhz. It also 'feels' like it's giving the 2080 Super everything it needs to be it's best.
 

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I've pondered this one a bit and have a couple answers. When I was getting started with buying my own stuff, my first board, the Tyan S1470 was a rockstar as it sported PCI and ISA slots and could use EDO and SDRAM at the same time. Hard to beat that with a stick.

Though, the A7N8X-Deluxe was also a tough one to beat. Got some great t-bred and Barton overclocks and it lasted quite a long time.
 
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