Asus Crosshair II Formula Ran my Phenom II without any trouble and was unfortunately replaced with what I consider my most hated board: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3. Buggy, terrible fan control options for the very few fan headers, refused to overclock and woeful onboard audio. This board has totally put me off any Gigabyte boards. The ASRock 990FX Extreme4 that replaced it just blows it away.
Pretty tough to be honest, couple of awesome boards spring to mind - Abit KX7 333-R - fantastic board for Socket A overclocking Asus P4C-800 Deluxe - coupled with the Asus CT-479 made for some great fun pentium-m overclocking P5B Vanilla - This is probably the winner. One of the cheaper boards around at the time and often overlooked as most people were using the deluxe version. Vmodded and with some decent cooling, managed 600 (iirc) odd FSB - with 4.2ghz on a E6300....
Without a doubt.... Yes, it was a bit flaky sometimes, but so much fun to mess with, and got some great over-clocks from my FX57 I was torn between this and my first ever motherboard.... Tyan Tomcat. c.1995/6 but that's just sentimentality I think... it was a pretty boring board, so the DFI wins.
Yes, I had the BH6 and the BX6 - both great boards, but they both died after a while. As did my mate's two. I don't know if it was something specific to the epic overclocking 440BX chipset that made them so fragile - I bought more afterwards though.
My Asus Rampage Formula that I had in my rig until recently. It overclocked my E6400 steadily at 3.2Ghz for a good few years and was worth every penny.
The BH6 was a great overclocker and one of the first jumperless motherboard. Overclocked my PII to death with it
This one for me and it's successor the Deluxe (which got rid if the noisy on-board fan). This was the first board I bought that enabled me to run SLI.
I have the first in a demo box at work. Talk about the importance of expansion cards. I have the second one or something very similar to it there also.
I like that one quite a lot. Epic for any core 2 duo, but not that great for core 2 quad (Yorkfield). It still has a live thread on Xtreme Systems and modded bioses for quads.
I bought my first computer which had an Abit AB9 Pro in 2006/7. Its been running overclocked since 2008 IIRC; firstly a Core 2 Duo and now a Core2Quad. It still runs smooth today despite having been run overclocked for 7 years....I wonder if its one of the last ones standing.
Another vote for DFI LANparty SLI-DR - cracking boards, i overclocked so many opterons on them! Think it started with the single core 146's and then went on to dual core 165's. Those were the days, endless time to tweak an overclock and stress test it! Used to smash out hours of BF2 aswell. I actually have one up in the antic with an opteron 170 in it and maybe an old radeon 1950XTX. I should dig it out to behold the splendor of Opteron and DFI, and windows XP....
My trusty old P5K Premium. Was trying to find my old invoice, but can't remember where I bought it from, thought it was scan or Aria, but according to my order history it wasn't. Anyway, great board, kept my Q6600 at a 400MHz FSB for 6 years and never had any issues with it (apart from the GTX660 and 580 which blocked two of the SATA ports). Got loads of right angle SATA cables now that are useless with my new mobo as it already has 90degree ports on it.
Asus P4P800 by far, served me well, and managed to survive my two vmods and managed to get my 2.4C up to 3.6GHz. DFI SLI-DR come in second - so incredibly unreliable and flaky, sold it after two months for an Asus A8N-SLI Premium, but for some reason I have fond memories of it.
Doesn't everyone have fond memories of the nForce4 ish era of DFI boards? I never owned one, but can remember drooling over the scan page for it, thinking how cool it would look with my UV cold cathodes.
The thread was opened and closed in one post for me, because the OP's pick - the new Asus ITX boards - is also mine. I went for the slightly less expensive version, the P8H77-I. Having all the features, stability and looks of a premium ATX board on an ITX form factor feels like I'm living in the future...
Can't say I've ever been that excited about a motherboard. First I ever owned and was still working until the day I gave it away nearly ten years later. I really like my M2N 32SLI and the MSI GD70, both of which I still own. My current P97 Sabretooth has to be the most attractive board I've ever owned though.
I had the deluxe version of that board, still do somewhere. Was my first brand new bought mobo and had it for donkeys years with 2 7900GTOs and an E6600. It had a 'black hole' of overclocking between 2.6 and 2.8 which made life difficult, but stood up well till my psu blew up.
