Over at [H]ard|OCP is a painful walk down memory lane for those who have been working with computer components for the last few decades, specifically the worst five motherboards they have reviewed. It is a reminder to those who lived through this time and perhaps an eye opener for those who are only now encountering things such as RAM incompatibility. It is somewhat of a surprise that the ALi based A7A-266, with its hybrid RAM controller which allowed you to have issues with both SDRAM and DDR as well as the need to use a graphite pencil or conductive ink to adjust settings as the DIP switches were not present on all boards.
"We have been reviewing motherboards here at HardOCP for about 20 years now. And in that time, many have been flush with horrible features and bugs of all kinds. Dan takes a stroll down a very painful memory lane and rehashes his top five..as instructed by his therapist. Let it out Dan…let it out."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Windows 10 is no longer supported on some Intel Atom 2-in-1 devices @ The Inquirer
- Microsoft Yanks Three Bad Patches Of Their Last Outlook Patch @ Slashdot
- PLC vs Arduino Show Down @ Hack A Day
- HTC grovels after serving up keyboard ads to some users @ The Inquirer
- The 2017 HP Spectre x360 With Active Pen Revealed! @ TechARP
I have an nforce motherboard
I have an nforce motherboard still running 24/7 since late 2006,
it never worked right but was more than good enough.
The LAN chip died a few years ago, and the integrated video died like the first year.
Amazingly I prefer bios from 20 years ago then today.
Today ASUS and MSI bios drive me nuts. So sluggish, so unresponsive.
They feel like look over function, a scattered mess.
Good thing this is something you open and use like once of twice in the life of the PC.
So to me at least, yes less jumper is nice.. but bios went “RGB” (backward)
Ugh. This will take me down
Ugh. This will take me down a memory lane I do not wish to revisit! Bad boards, bad boards! Whatch’ya gonna do? Whatch’ya gonna do when they come for you?
I think dealing with motherboard BIOS(es) was even more of a pain than fiddling with AT strings for recalcitrant modems, back in my BBS/Door-game days.
They blew it by not including
They blew it by not including the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. Talk about a piece of shit. If there are any working boards left in existence, someone either preemptively recapped them, or the person in possession should buy more lottery tickets.
I owned two of these, one
I owned two of these, one such I did recap and still had issues later on. The other is still working, though hasn’t been powered on in a few years. Opteron 185 in that one iirc.
I have a 990FXA-UD3 (The
I have a 990FXA-UD3 (The little brother to #3 on the list), and yeah, its horrible and it really makes me wish I had the money to upgrade my PC.
1: My RAM doesn’t OC. At all. If you try, it won’t make it past
POST.
2: I run 2 GTX 760 in SLI. Worked great. I got a new, fancy 1440p
144fps G-Sync
display. Cool!
…except for the fact that I can no longer use SLI. Either
GPU independently? Go for it! One GPU as a dedicated Phys-X
card? No problem!
SLI? Run a 3D program that uses it an instant lock up needing
me
to press the reset button on the PC.
‘member back in da day, there
‘member back in da day, there was, not just a board, but a whole chipset for core2 that would, for no reason, randomly loose sata ports, like unfindable at post, change to a new port and no more problem till next time. Something 45….. I think. Member dat?
Yes most annoying prob why
Yes most annoying prob why raid cards were standard in my builds just to negate that issue.
Dealing with nvidia chipset
Dealing with nvidia chipset driver issues was one of the worst time periods of system building, running a partially broken Linux distro was the only thing I could get running stable until I could afford a new motherboard.
I think that motherboards are
I think that motherboards are never my friends. At most they’re like an annoying colleague I tolerate because he’s doing a useful job (just barely).