Hi all. I want to buy this board (linked below) or a similar board for an HTPC build I'm doing. But it's straight outta china, which makes me question whether it's a real Asus brand board. Hard to tell with these things. It seems unlikely that this is some kind of refurb, and much more likely that they were made there new. And as you all know, china has been known to just use other people's IP and brand name at will. So what are your thoughts? Is this real, or fake? If it's a fake, do you have a board recommendation? I'd like to use socket 1155 cause that's 3rd gen i5 and you can get a good cpu for $30 these days. Great for a 5-8 year HTPC for 4k video. Thanks! https://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-A...sh=item41b442dd25:g:rscAAOSwyDxXhvAl&LH_BIN=1
Can't see why it wouldn't be. hardly seems worth the effort at that price point. Also what country are you from? I'm sure it's not that hard to match
I'm in the usa. If it's real, do you have any idea what's going on? Why do they have a bunch of these boards to sell? It just seems suspicious. Are these refurbs, or is Asus just building new 1155 boards and selling them? I'd really like to know more about the whole situation.
It's quite possible that a company in China was using the boards and have since upgraded. Then either sold on or dumped and the eBay seller has picked them up.
The Asus P8H61 were huge sellers and one of the boards I see most often in scrap/recovered/donated hardware. Still pretty viable, but the lack of native USB 3 really sucked. No reason to ever fake one, there are millions about. Based on the general prevalence of Chinese board sellers like this (and the comparative lack of a native desktop PC culture in China, them still being kind of a second-world economy with not much affluent disposable income), I would guess that there's an entire industry of refurbishers buying broken boards in bulk from warranty handlers or disposal companies and repairing obvious things on them - it's China, the boards were made there in the first place, so finding people with the skills to repair them should be easy. They may even be lone individuals doing it from their apartments with skills they learned in the factories. The prevalence of repair services on eBay lends credence to this: if you have a damaged CPU socket, DIMM slots, PCIex16 slot, etc. you can send it off to China and get it repaired for a pittance.
Thanks to all for the replies. You seem to know a bit about boards so I'd like to ask you - What kind of board is that Asus, anyway? There are so many different board types these days that one wonders whether there's actually any real specification anymore. If I'm not mistaken, that board is a DTX type, correct? Basically an ITX but they lengthened it to accommodate a couple more slots. These seem to be uncommon.. would you consider that a valid assessment? I've noticed there don't seem to be many gigabyte brand or asrock brand variants.
It's mATX, DTX is shorter height-wise. It's an incredibly common size and make of board as boiled_elephant mentioned above. Though there are quite a few sizes of board, they all do conform to one of the standards, and most will stick to the major three (ATX, mATX, or Mini-ITX).
The above is correct, mATX is a size between ATX (the standard 'big' board with 6 expansion spacings) and ITX (just one expansion spacing). People like them because they're versatile, you can have 2 or 3 expansion cards or a graphics card and one expansion card. I dislike them personally and prefer ITX, because expansion cards are almost a thing of the past now (other than PCI SSDs), and because if you're going to have a tower taking up ~2 feet vertically and a 6x30" footprint on the floor, what's the point of making it like 2 inches shorter, but I'm very much in a minority opinion there. mATX is the most popular board size because it meets a variety of requirements. If you're fairly new to mid-range used motherboards, you're kind of in the right area already by accident: 3rd gen onwards is much better value/performance then anything older, and Asus are reliable and well-made, they were the pioneer of all-solid-state caps and other neat improvements that made boards more durable, and they haven't had as many weird firmware issues and instabilities in my experience compared to, in particular, Gigabyte DualBIOS boards from the same sort of era. Avoid those. I've bought a lot of Gigabyte equivalents of this board, they all have DualBIOS and it seems very prone to instability and needing regularly clearing and reflashing. Asus were always more reliable in my experience (probably why they hold their value better). You may want to look at B75 based boards if your target is 3rd gen 2nd hand, though, as they have native USB 3 and other features that were hit and miss on H61 (H61 was a middle child in technologies, missing some features that became standard later on, which is why they're sometimes very cheap.) However, note that if you're buying used hardware and you find yourself paying £40 for a board, you may be into the realm of false economy, because brand new budget boards (like B450 based mATX boards) are often as little as £50, DDR3 has held its value weirdly well and is too expensive given how old it is so DDR4 isn't that much more expensive. So you might be better off buying new components, with warranties. I personally have given up on eBay boards - not because they got worse, but because their prices went up while brand new prices went down, and now it's not really worth bothering unless you can find a bargain.
Large organizations will often standardize on a particular build, so you could have thousands of identical systems all coming out of service during a refresh, plus any spares. Based on the stuff that seller has available, I'd guess they specialize in breaking down old systems that they get in bulk; ebay what they can and recycle/bin the rest.
Just because it's direct shouldn't necessarily be a bad sign. When one of my Zotac fans started making a little annoying noise, although still working fine, I contaced them to find a replacement. They pointed me to look at AliExpress and ebay sellers direct from China where I picked up a perfect Zotac replacement.
Well there is one other thing to consider here, and maybe I'm wrong about this but - There is the meme about how "Intel did nearly nothing for 6 years". Which is typical, when there wasn't a whole lot of competition from AMD during that period. This is reflected by the fact that it took the i7-8700k to finally double the power of my i5-3570k. I would've thought that the i7-6700 would've easily doubled my old i5 3570, but not so. Then there's my goal, which is just to make an inexpensive computer that will perform it's only job fine for 8 years. That's about how often I upgrade my TV, and a 3rd Gen i5 processor should be fine for the next 8 years. I think. Since it's only an HTPC that needs to be able to stream and playback 4k video files, the main component would be the video card. I already have a card that is more than capable of performing this task, so now all I need is a board and CPU that won't somehow impede this function as time goes on. And if I use these old components, then the board, cpu, cooler, and ram will only cost me roughly $150. I already have the rest of the components laying around. I agree but I've been scammed by china products on ebay before. They'll often play the "catch me if you can" game when it comes to IP. They'll make real looking fakes, or something that looks quite similar to the real thing with lesser specs. Iirc apple has always had a big problem with them doing that.
I heartily agree. As I say, I only stopped ebaying boards because they got oddly expensive. 3rd/4th gen is still my go-to for a general purpose cheap computer. The parts are so common that I managed to build a friend his first gaming PC entirely out of donated/inherited/redundant spares. 3rd gen i5, 8gb, gtx 670, 450w PSU. It hit a solid 60fps in Unigine Valley on max settings - not bad for free. The price of new CPUs is the big gap I spose. It does wind me up that you've got to spend about £200 just on your CPU to get a noticeable fps increase over a £30 ebay CPU.
Yeah people seem to think their old obsolete stuff is worth gold. Maybe if it's some kind of collector's item, but most of this stuff isn't.
I do have one last question for this thread: If that asus I linked is a low end board, what was the high end board of that form factor? A mATX board that was about the same size, but would be considered "high end"? Of that period, socket 1155.
I use a Mini ITX Asus P8H61 S1155 motherboard which I bought last May. It works just fine... It's quite a few years old now and doesn't really keep up with the workloads I'm throwing at it, plus it has an ASmedia USB3 controller which some early USB3 devices can be fussy about. But it was very cheap and it does exactly what it needs to - it's not the fault of the motherboard that the i5-3470 is too slow for me! EDIT" Not suggesting that my board would be considered 'high end socket 1155'! The listing you linked to is covered by the ebay money back guarantee by the looks of it - if something goes wrong then you're pretty much guaranteed a refund.
The high end chip set back then was Z68. There where a couple matx boards, but the selection wasn't all that great. The best one: Asus Maximus Gene IV-Z (but tends to be very pricey on ebay) If you want something you have a reasonable chance of finding used at an okish price: Gigabyte Z68MA-D2H-B3 ASRock Z68 PRO3-M If you want to track down something exotic for the fun of it: EVGA Z68 SLI Micro
Those sure are... wide. I guess the mATX standard allows for a variety of widths. That original board I linked was much slimmer. That's what made me think it must be a different standard. Apparently some matx boards a basically just a square, while others are not. Anyway thanks for the help all. Much appreciated!
I still have an Asus P8Z77-M working away with my 3770 in my second rig. Not the top end but a nice little board. https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P8Z77M/
