The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards

[seminatl]

Now that Intel exited the business, what is the motherboard brand for people who just want a motherboard that works? One without any lights on it at all. It seems like supermicro would be the straight-faced alternative, but they don’t pay attention and often their boards just don’t work. I want a board that advertises its attention to signal integrity and thermal safety.

[CoolGuySteve]

It seems backwards but late revision high end gaming boards have economies of scale that force the manufacturers into making stable boards to reduce RMA volume. The boards also tend to be cheaper too due the same economies of scale.

The VRM and other power delivery circuits on overclocking boards are also typically engineered to handle much higher voltages than spec.

Avoid the first revision though, which is probably good advice for any device.

[Takron]

Although they certain have boards with flashy lights, Gigabyte has been my mainstay for stable boards, and they do advertise signal integrity and thermal safety. (They also have a Black Edition of many of their boards, which has extra testing)

[fw_double_e]

I've always had really good results (performance and longevity) with Asus gaming boards despite them having all the LED "features." I just turn all that junk off in the bios.

[unixhero]

Supermicro for fully fledged workstation experience

ASUS as a good "home" option

In reality I would suggest investing in HP Z series workstations or Z series small formfactor machines. They rock!

[mikece]

When I started building my own machines I originally went the inexpensive route with AMD CPUs and (I forget the brand) boards, but after three motherboard failures in 18 months I switched to Intel CPUs and Intel boards and never had a problem again. I haven't built a machine in years (I buy laptops, Mac minis, and Intel NUCs for my computing needs) and while it's a little sad that Intel is out of this game now if I was going to build out a Windows/Linux/*BSD non-laptop system it would likely be a NUC anyway so, in a way, I don't feel like I would be missing anything.

[fortran77]

I used to buy Intel boards because they were more likely to work well with the latest CPUs of the day. I've switched to SuperMicro boards for our desktops (which are mostly dual Xeon boxes) and have had few problems.

I wish they'd come with a TPM. The integration issues are frequently around the TPM and getting it recognized. It's required for BitLocker whole disk encryption which is part of our standard build. (If a machine or drive goes AWOL, we don't have to worry.)

[btb]

I used to go for boards with a physical TPM as well(the Qxxx) and had the same driver issues you mentioned. But I've been reading recently that it might not be needed, since some of the newer intel chipsets(like z390) now have builtin Intel® Platform Trust Technology (Intel® PTT) which supposedly is a sort of firmware based TPM. I plan to give it a shot and see if it works for bitlocker hardware encryption when I buy my next motherboard.

[jaas]

In case it's helpful for you to know, you can set up Bitlocker without a TPM. Google for instructions. It works well.

[Jaruzel]

I have an intel board in my current daily desktop PC, it's socket LGA1150 also, but previous generation, Ivy Bridge. Of all the desktop motherboards I've had (and I've gone through a lot) it's the most stable I've ever used.

[EvanAnderson]

I worked for a small company who built white-box PCs in the late 90's thru the early 2000's. The Intel desktop boards were far and away more reliable than any other manufacturer's boards. The Intel boards weren't flashy or as feature-filled, and they did have some "duds" (particulat board models with various "erratum", the whole 820 chipset SDRAM controller debocle), but their manufacturing consistency was excellent. I don't believe I ever encountered a DOA board coming out of the box, which I can't say for ASUS or Gigabyte.

Edit: Power supply quality helps a lot, too, as others have said. I can't remember the brand of power supplies we used, but that definitely mattered.

[blt]

Same. I built a modest core i3 machine in like 2012 for my dad. That computer has had zero problems and runs Windows 7 with uptimes comparable to Linux servers. I never really thought about it until now, but the Intel motherboard might be the reason.

[GoToRO]

I had to upgrade and couldn't find an Intel board. Choose from what was available, not cheap, and suddenly my PC has a personality (in a bad way).

[iforgotpassword]

Are you overclocking or doing other fancy things? Last time I had an issue with a board was core 2 duo times. PCIe would magically cripple itself to 1x for all slots as soon as I overclocked the CPU. There was a workaround for that on the gigabyte forums. But that's about every problem I ever had.

[justin66]

I did not know Intel stayed in the desktop motherboard business as long as they did. I had an AL440LX motherboard-based system that I'm sure still works, after a few battery and power supply replacements, if it hasn't been disposed of. (I'm sure it has been disposed of)

The author fails to understand some things:

Not so for the owners of Intel boards. To show just much Intel values its customers, they were informed that BIOS updates were not forthcoming and the newer, faster processors were not supported on Intel boards. That was no doubt particularly galling to the owners of the DZ87KLT boards, which sold for around $300 when new and are worth $150 or more even today (2019).

...

After all the hoopla in 2018 about Meltdown and Spectre, guess what happened: Intel somehow magically managed to update the BIOS for those boards after akl. For the DZ87KLT-75K, nothing really changed because the ME firmware did not get updated. But for the DQ87PG board, the 2018 BIOS updates did update the ME firmware as well.

It's precisely because Intel "values its customers," or more precisely because Intel understands its value add for customers versus the other motherboard manufacturers, that they would not just slide support for a few extra CPUs into the firmware. To do the job to their own standards they would need to fully retest everything with those new CPUs before officially supporting them. The economics of the Meltdown and Spectre fixes is an entirely separate matter.

(it'd be fair to point out that home power users who want to upgrade the CPU on a motherboard after purchase were never a large proportion of the Intel motherboard buying public and, in recent years... there cannot be that many)

[tus88]

Ha. I recently upgraded to a 4790s and a intel desktop board. I thought the restarting problem was a faulty board, now I know better! Wonder how hard it is to update the ME...when I updated the bios the problem was still there.

[Jaruzel]

The intel drivers page for your board should have an update package for the ME (if one is available).

[mindslight]

Looking at the attitude of locked down chipsets and ME, would you expect any better? Intel's goal is to sell a product that fulfills some short-sighted requirements and never look back.

Their main business customers aren't interested in mixing and matching pieces of already purchased computers. Just like they don't particularly care that the whole house of cards is theoretically subservient to some inauditable backdoor.

[undersuit]

That's how I feel about the NUCs. They are only being produced by Intel to try and advance a market.

Intel makes processors. The will sell things like motherboards, Compute Sticks, and NUCs just to push their primary line. Even their Flash, Intel doesn't want to be a Flash Fab, but it helps their processor line in many ways to have a presence.

It's like the Microsoft Surface. Microsoft will drop support for it in a hot minute when they feel the Surface has succeeded or failed. They already did it once with the Surface RT, but maybe I'm wrong and Microsoft is pivoting with the Surface to be more Apple-like... lol

[rhn_mk1]

What does the article mean by the "end" of desktop boards? Is it the end of sockets accepting multiple generations of CPUs?

I can see that it's not entirely true either, Socket 1151 supports both Skylake and Kaby Lake: http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z390%20Phantom%20Gaming%20X/index...

What change did actually take place?

[MrRadar]

They used to make their own motherboards and sell them to consumers. They were known for being very high quality and very reliable. Now you can only get boards for their chips from third party OEMs who tend to have much more variable quality (which vendors are "best" tends to change each board/chipset generation).

[IE6]

Intel used to sell motherboards too which anecdotally I seem to recall them being expensive but performant and this article covers how around 2013 when Intel got out of the motherboard business their support of next gen processors (i.e. post 2013) on existing motherboards was lackluster.

[jandrese]

I wish Intel would allow third party chipsets again. I liked the days when companies would compete on features like more PCI lanes and faster interconnects.

[seminatl]

The PCIe root ports are integrated with the CPUs these days. If you want more slots, get a breakout box. Nobody can get you more lanes.

[ngcc_hk]

It is not clear the situation, but guess may be you need to have those board.