It depends on how you service your boxes, and how much whiz-bang crap is on the motherboard. If you rely on vendors to service the boxes, and use a vendor like

It depends on how you service your boxes, and how much whiz-bang crap is on the motherboard. If you rely on vendors to service the boxes, and use a vendor like IBM that likes to tweak the firmware of the boards, you're going to have alot of random crap diagnosed as "motherboard failure". Many of these issues are really configuration or software issues -- issues that the SAs should be fixing by keeping firmware up to date. Back in the 90's, the vendor CE's would have a clue and advise the customer staff to try applying software fixes, or stop using buggy feature X. But these days, the smart CEs are mostly dead, retired, or laid-off, and their replacements are often contracted out people who just know how to swap out parts. (Or have an incentive for you to have more failures, since part swaps == money.) If you as an admin actually service your stuff, you'll notice failure patterns and actually troubleshoot the stuff.