Tyan Tiger MP is my favourite classic board, simply because running two CPUs back then was insane. More modern boards it's the Impact VI installed in my wife's rig/portable box. So dinky, yet utterly packed with features.
Cant find a picture of it anywhere I was really happy with my first pc mb, came with a pre made machine. High Screen C something. Ran my my 486 DX2 66. Motherboard was a really beast for the time in that it had the following: 1) I/O onboard 2) 72 pin and 30 pin simm sockets 3) ISA, VLBUS and PCI sockets 4) BIOS / I/O supported LBA so I was able to add and 850MB HD without having to use the weird HD software that would provide LBA support but at the detriment of performance. As the board was so up-gradable I was able to mix and match upgrades for a while, ie 30 pin simms to 72 pin simms. Went from an ISA video card, to a VLBUS to finally a PCI one (Diamond stealth 1MB!) More modern boards: Abit BH6 MSI 694D Raid (Dual Tulatins!) Asus P4C800-E Delux (Northwood Overlocking, 1.6A to 2.1)
My first motherboard was my favorite. The Zotac Geforce 9300-itx. It ran my E5200 at 3.8GHz. Plus it had WiFi onboard.
for me it's got to be my old asus p5q deluxe. got my q9650 to 4.3ghz....6 years on it's still going strong!
the most troublesome mobo i've ever owned! back in the day i went through about 3 of them! no bios recovery, so broke all of them overclocking. switched to a p5q deluxe after the third one.
There has been a few fav contenders but Abit - NF7-S v2.0, has to get it, had my xp2500 up to 2.6, but ran 24/7 stable 2.5, had a couple nf7-s and 1 nf7, had the following board sinked mosfets/nb etc, cpu was cooled by a Thermalright SP-97, pic showing aero cooler, surprised nobody has mentioned the abit prior, what a shame they went out of the game Biostar TF8200 A2+(Skt AM2) love biostar boards cheap and some great clockers the following a £51 motherboard and a £36 cpu Had to throw in a couple of epox I was rocking opterons on mine when everybody was running their dfi's EPoX - EP-9NPA+ (Skt 939) Epox - EP-9NPA+Ultra (Skt 939)
When you say broke I presume you tried remove the cmos battery. The bios was supposed to revert back on unstable OC, but after the first few times I found it never did. Simply removing the CMOS battery for a few seconds always fixed it for me though. That said they didn't like to play nice for sure, but that was part of my love for it as once I had it configured it was a rock and continues to be so. I tried every bios revision and found all but 1201 to not allow me to reach 3.6ghz on my Q6600.
Ah! *Waves hands to get attention* Cei, what audio inputs and outputs does the board have? I would like to use it in a super HTPC and am wondering how best to link it up to an AV receiver.
Favorite one I never owned, purely for aesthetics the Sapphire Pure. White PCBs look so hot, its a real shame they aren't more common. Was never able to find any in stock ever when they were around, so I settled for a similar MSI board in red at the time. Favorite board I have owned so far is my Gigabyte G1.Assassin.V2 that I'm currently using. I find the chipset heatsink ever so tacky, but thankfully it's much covered up with the gpu so I don't really notice it. Otherwise has a nice set of features and good looks, very good Creative Xfi onboard audio.
As Nexxo says, 3 jacks on the daughter board, all 3.5mm (In, Out, Mic). There's then a S/PDIF out located on the main I/O, just above the HDMI and DisplayPort jacks. All jacks have auto-detection and can be swapped to front headers. As for linking to a receiver, depends on what receiver you have. Ideal would be S/PDIF as it'll support full surround sound and the like. If you're running stereo speakers then you could also opt for the Line Out jack.
