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The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tus88 7y agoHa. 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 7y agoThe intel drivers page for your board should have an update package for the ME (if one is available).
- tus88 7y agoFollowing a few links and searches there is a github page with all the ME bins and related tools. The key is installing a newer version of ME than comes with the board BIOS.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoIt is not clear the situation, but guess may be you need to have those board.
- Jaruzel 7y agoI 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.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoAre 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.
- zamalek 7y agoI used to own an Intel Ivy. It simply wouldn't boot at all with the smallest possible OC (yes, I had a 'K) and would automatically revert. Never had stability problems though.
- drcross 7y agoOverclocking desktops in 2019 is only extremely rarely a productive use of your time.
- rasz 7y agoOverclocking desktop in 2019 is a 10 minute affair to gain a permanent >20% performance.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoI think it's a little less clear of a performance benefit in 2019, now that every CPU will dynamically overclock itself within thermal limits.
- leetcrew 7y agoIntel parts only dynamically OC to their max turbo presets. you can often go quite a bit further if you don't care about idle power use. I was able to OC my 9700k to run 5 GHz on all cores and tighten up the AVX offset to -1 (I think it's -3 stock). can I notice the difference outside of benchmarks? probably not, but the performance increase per core is comparable to stepping up to a stock 9700k from a 9600k (ignoring core count). if you would pay $100 to have a 9700k instead of a 9600k (which I did), why not overclock it too? it took me about 20 minutes of actual work and 12 hours of waiting for stress tests to fail.
- GoToRO 7y agoI 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).
- blt 7y agoSame. 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.
- tjoff 7y agoNot really, that is the norm for most decent brands. Bad PSUs are probably a bigger factor.
- EvanAnderson 7y agoI 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.
- tracker1 7y agoThey've also been faster at removing older tech, and getting newer stuff integrated when they were building/designing them. I remember getting one of the first Intel boards without a floppy controller (or parallel/serial headers). Of course bit me in the ass trying to get Windows Server on the thing since the extra device drivers for HDD controller was via floppy. Power supply issues have bitten me in the past probably more than anything else in terms of issues.
- seminatl 7y agoNow 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.
- fw_double_e 7y agoI'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.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAnecdotal, but my Asus Z170i from 2015 has been solid for 4 years. Doesn't have any lights, maybe there wasn't room for them in the miniITX form factor. EDIT - had the date wrong, it was mid-2016.
- soylentcola 7y agoAlso anecdotal: My desktop is still running smoothly on its Asus mobo from 2014 (I believe it was the Z97-P but I'm not home at the moment to double check). No fancy RGB LEDs, but I haven't shopped for one in a while so that may be harder to accomplish now. Not sure. Either way, they've always been competitively priced and well supported. Used them to build both gaming and general use machines for friends/family over the past several years without issue.
- Krssst 7y agoBe careful with Asus motherboards: it seems that Z390 boards will push some Asus software to Windows installations just by booting it unless you disable it properly in the BIOS. As a consequence, you probably want to disable the BIOS option before booting any Windows installation (in my case, it was called "Q-installer", but it is different for gaming boards in my understanding). Until you disable it, it will reinstall and re-enable itself at boot. See: https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-automatically-push-software-into-your-windows-installation?cp=3 https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-au... In my case, I noticed it thanks to Windows Server pointing out which service was slowing down shutdown, which was "AsusUpdateCheck". Increased the shutdown time by a few seconds. I did not find any info about how to make Windows ignore the WPBT table.
- rhn_mk1 7y agoWhat 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.asp http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z390%20Phantom%20Gaming%20X/index... What change did actually take place?
- MrRadar 7y agoThey 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).
- eropple 7y agoI dunno about that. If you're buying whatever's on sale, yeah, you're at the whims of the stamp-it-out gods. But I build a lot of PCs and Gigabyte, for example, has been consistently reliable across...five or six generations of Intel chips? Plus some AMD builds in there. Absolutely zero failures. Anecdotal, but it also seems to line up with most of what I hear out there.
- kube-system 7y agoI see a lot of mentions of Gigabyte and Asus in this thread -- I have had good luck with MSI boards too. Maybe the reason Intel quit making boards is because there are lots of good motherboards now?
- Alupis 7y agoIt might also matter what "tier" of board you buy. Getting the "basement bargain" board for $20... well, you get what you pay for. But for each of those top brands, Gigabyte, ASUS, and MSI, buying their top tier products gets you a seriously good board. The gaming boards tend to have a lot of features a workstation user might not need, like great overclocking support, etc... but with that quality comes stability. Worth every penny to get a good motherboard when doing a build. That... and I no longer get cheap cases either... but that's another story. The moral? Don't skimp on your components, and you'll wind up with a much better system that lasts you for years.
- fortran77 7y agoI 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.)
- jaas 7y agoIn case it's helpful for you to know, you can set up Bitlocker without a TPM. Google for instructions. It works well.
- fortran77 7y agoDon't you need to type in an additional password every time you boot?
- btb 7y agoI 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mindslight 7y agoLooking 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 7y agoThat'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
- jandrese 7y agoI 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.
- justin66 7y agoI 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)