There is Asrock of course. Also EVGA and ECS Elitegroup make motherboards.

what happened to the others?

with soitek when i was playing a game it suddenly turned off after working for 2 years, and it never turned back on. didn't know what happend to the board and the company

SPCR actually listed it as a recommend since at the time it was one of the few to allow undervolting. my cpu was undervolted.

there are others like Biostar and Supermicro that has started to make consumer mobos. I do miss Intel, Abit and DFI.

yeah me to i actually owned a dfi

what happened to abit and dfi? bankruptcy?

which of the 4 msi asrom gigabyte asus is highest quality? asus seems most expensive

Yup, both went bankruptcy, as far as i know.

Imo Asus has taken the spot of high end stuff with the Rampage/Maximus/Zenith lines, but for me more things come into account than brand, Asus for a long time have done practices that affected me, specially bios fan control and their restrictions and policies, fake 4pin pwm headers, their so called asus way of measuring cpu temps, and their boalted AI Suite are things that steer me away from Asus. For me AsRock and MSI are always on my top of the list for a new build, their bios fan control is superb, they dont limit their users or need a tuning feature to let you overide the retrictions (that doesnt work all the time). AsRock now has the Fatal1ty and Taichi as their high end and MSI has their Goodlike/MaxPower line, but imo Asus still has the crown into top end with their high end lines. Now about quality, i think all big 4 (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and AsRock) are good, in the past AsRock was more a value oriented brand, and they still are, but their products are much better now a days than they were 10 years ago, when i was an Asus fanboy.

funny i'm learning about this right now the only new and affordable under 70 socket 775 i could find on ebay to replace my msi 975 and gigabyte dsr3 p35 was asus p5k which does work but a bit different, no cpu voltage in bios for one thing

what about their bios fan control? it doesn't seem to play nice with speedfan

what restrictions and policies?


how are fake 4pin pwm headers fake ?



why called seems to work



doesn't work for me at all. it crashes in windows 7

Well in past generations its been restricted in the way they set it up, in a lot of motherboards they had very high restictions for Cha_FAN headers above 40%, in recent generatiosn they have implemented a sort of FanXpert inside the bios i believe they call it Qtuning, but it needs to read correctly the fan for you to be able to lower the restrictions, in some cases it does and in others it simply cant, i tried a lot of fans and to me one of the best build pwm deisgn is noctua and had issues with it, again this is my experience with only 1 motherboard (asus h170 pro gaming), and i still have it, and have updated bios every six months and the behavior is still the same.

Now one thing that you need to take into account, is that Asus is really good with FanXpert, probably the best software fan control of all manufacturers, and even their bios preset policies are pretty good, some here just set it to silent and be fine with it, but i personally like more control on that, again thats just me.

I seen some asus owners have fine time on Speedfan, personally i never had a perfect experience with speedfan, some of the headers in most of the builds i tried were not supported, so i cant say much about speedfan and asus.

This is a thing of the past, newer motherboards have switchable headers on the bios, but in case you want to read, ASUS Z87-Deluxe fake 4-pin headers & other fan control info.

Asus with Ai Suite has a very wierd way of displaying CPU temperature, that its the temperature that FanXpert takes to rule the fan behavior graphs that you do or that FanXpert suggests, so for example, i can plan a fan behavior, but if the temp is not real then it wont work the way i want it. The CPU temperature displayed on AI Suite doesnt match with core temperature nor with package temperature and to make it worst the behavior is not linear, its less on lower temps and scales up much faster on higher temps. What asus have said is that this is a very high end algorithm that asus engineers have design that take into account multiple sensors (not only the cpu) to predict a more real CPU temperature.... to me its is simply worthless algorith because it doesnt give me the temperature which i rule the fans.

Now remember im telling you my experiences, there are a lot here that have good experiences with Asus, but now a days to me they are my last choice on motherboards, i do recommend them still to users that want a setup that its set it and forget it, that dont want to tweak or mess with bios, i still think FanXpert is the best software for fan control on any motherboard manufacturer.

It should, but early version of AI Suite / FanXpert were buggy on some motherboards, but none the less i never had a asus motherboard that couldnt load the AI Suite.

the asus p5k disk says vista when i run it in compatibility it still crashes.

i prefer using speedfan which worked perfectly on msi 975 and gigabyte dsr3, doesnt work well on asus. bios seemingly only works with cpu fan and chasis fan 1, but not the other 2 fan headers.

ami bios is far different from what msi and gigabyte use, and am used to using.

right now i'm trying to learn clover efi bootloader to try on asus p5k

I still own an Abit LGA775 board and it still works! The bios has always given me endless grief, but it still chugs along. And because the heatsinks are anodized, it still looks brand new too!
I think they switched to server boards but then eventually went under.

This used to be my most visited PC forum, but coming back here now makes me sad. I think there's still a market for silent enthusiasts. Youtube videos would be great! Maybe they could do something in conjunction with Linus? - they're both in Canada.

i'm sad to

but if you have money,

ssd is the way to go,

seasonic fanless

nofan on an amd apu not sure if nofan works with am4

Why be sad? Be proud! Like Brzezinski I'm convinced that we defeated the evil empire almost singlehandedly. Would there be silent computers without SPCR? Hardly.

Based on my own observations I think a couple of extra nails in the coffin can be added.

VIII) Standard PC's are build with thought on being silent.

It is so with the standard office desktop machines I see at work, but also which I suspect matters more for us here, even the workstations we have are pretty good(Xeon based, silly amounts of RAM...). In fact it has become so that the office ventilation is louder.


9) The need for building a new PC has come down with machines being so powerful, so some simply build a new rig much less frequent.

An example. My do-it-all PC has a Core i7-870 which I bought in September 2009. Back then it was new and just about the fastest you could get, however I never imagined it to be able to last me so long. Now the machine it sits in has some work done over the years, two swaps of GPU, a replacement PSU, drives replaced with SSD's, main monitor was a 24" which became a 27" and is now a 40".
A new machine could bring faster CPU, faster RAM and faster storage as the MB is holding me back. However at work I sit with a monster workstation and this old thing at home feels equally fast.

Now I am sort of in the market for a new PC. That is however mainly because I have this little completely silent server(http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=65100), which has me wanting to explore having a completely silent main PC. Only wanting it to be able to run games in 4K means that still looks like a challenge. The current rig has a Fury X which is quiet at "idle" and still not bad when pushed, but finding something as fast or faster AND silent... (Tips are most welcome).