Whats your favorite motherboard of all time?

[Aquinus]

For capability, I love my P9X79 Deluxe. It's everything you could ever want (sans the wireless being crap, but I think it's replaceable with a better adapter that can do at least 5Ghz N.) For a board that's going to be 3 years old from release in December, it's still pretty loaded. You might not notice it by looking at it, but there are 3 USB 3.0 hubs on this board, it is limited by PCI-E 2.0 1x for each hub (250MB/s) but for most purposes, that's a tolerable upper limit for each pair of USB 3.0 ports. Remember, it's almost 3 years old!

For stability, I have a First International Computer motherboard with a 2.4Ghz Celeron in the attic that is so rugged that you can over-volt the crap out of it and it will just take it. It's one of those boards that you can "drag through the mud" so to speak and it will keep on chugging. It was right as SATA was coming out too. It had two 1.5Gbps SATA ports and 1Gbps ethernet. I even tried a drive on the SATA and copied data off of it using gigabit and saw 100MB/s. Not too shabby for a skt478 board and piece of shit CPU. I do have 2GB of DDR memory it could take. I could indeed bring it back to life if I wanted to, along with an AGP 4x Radeon 9200.

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

 

[KingPing]

Abit IP35 Pro

It was a super easy to overclock, very little vdroop, never had stability issues or degradation, very easy to flash bios (for the time), lots of features, long lifespan, went from a Pentium D920 through a C2D e8400 to finally a C2Q Q9550. Intuitive BIOS. It's still running rock solid as my server and (thanks to Steam) games streaming PC.

I love this board. Sadly Abit is gone.

 

[Kursah]

I have a few favorites, but if I must choose one...it's the DFI LanParty P35-T2RS. I spent weeks and months researching my upgrade from my 4th RMA'd ASUS P965 Deluxe. The DFI is still running in a gaming rig for a friend too..such a champ of a board This board brought a whole new level to "every little detail" overclocking, especially in the memory department by allowing users to set an amazing array to eek out every little tiny bit of performance possible. Was a solid board on the OC front, did run a little toasty to the point I added a 40mm fan to the NB. But the fact that it's still running an OC'd e8400 like a boss is a true statement to a legacy of this brand, RIP... Oh ya and I did the pencil vDroop mod too! Worked great and lasted a loooooong time.

This board could OC with the best of em, and had so many solid features that boards twice it's price had. I love my current Asus board...but my next favorite easily goes to my P5Q Deluxe that I purchased Open Box from Newegg, which is also still running an OC'd Q9650 for a friend. I'd rate this board as my favorite overclocker for late-gen Core2's, it could hit amazing FSB speeds, ran cool and was ready for whatever...no Quads or Duals could hold it back. Was a true beast when it came to overclocking. Made it fun again!:

BUUUUUT, last but not least. An old friend by the name of Fitseries3 sold me some used parts he had...one of them being an Asus Sabertooth 55i... another board that's still running strong with an OC'd i5 760...this board was a beast. I'd give this the best looking and cleanest looking board I've ever owned. It OC'd that 760 like a champ, ran cool, stable, was easy as hell to tweak, a bit in the simple side but plenty potent. Probably the most stable board I've ever owned too.

The board that brought me to signing up to TPU and posting my OC results, the board that I bought months before buying my CPU (a P4-630 HT) and soldered resistors as a vDroop mod is the Asus AS8-v. Sure it was an economy board, it had plenty of get up and go. It was a beast among boards that I could afford on my paltry budget 10 years ago. I spent so many hours trying various blends of voltage and fsb settings to reach stable OC's. Eventually slapped a Zalman 7700 AlCu cooler on it, and at one point used an AC exhaust window panel and a dryer vent in the middle of a cold, dry, Montana winter to achieve amazing temp results..that was short lived in fear of condesation, but fun!

Sorry for the large post...it's tough to pick just one. Each of thse four has a story and are a favorite in one aspect or another. If only one could take the crown...man...you'd have to put a gun to my head...all are great boards and I spent hours researching before purchase, the riskiest being the P5Q, the DFI being better than expected, the 55i sabertooth being the most stable and best looking, and the AS8-v getting me back into OC-ing on a budget. My current Asus Z87-Pro is kinda fugly but it's grown on me and has shown it's a great OC-ing unit with an amazing WiFi adapter, amazing stability and hasn't let me down yet. I won't post a picture of that one though....as it hasn't earned what these boards have...yet.

 

[nick_1992]

DFI Lanparty DK 790 FX-B

Loved it back in the day in my old rig

 

[eidairaman1]

DFI NFII ULTRA B-
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/voltmods/113

Had so many moded bios and even these volt mods (i never did any volt mods just bios mods, worked flawless until NV pulled driver support for the gart after windows vista came out. Ocd 2 2500s to 3200 spec (266 Fsb Axp 2500-M and Vanilla unlocked)

Wish i had a NF7-S from abit (Either this or the Abit board ocd an Axp to 3.0Ghz)

 

[Tatty_Two]

Loved that one, My house caught fire, my rig was on the floor when they began spraying to put it out, There were burnt capacitors and water damage. Cleaned it up, dried it off and the thing ran! Lost dual channel memory, but no bigs, worked perfectly, loved it. Still have the screwdriver that came with it!

Followed it up with this bad boy http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813123022

EPoX EP-AD580XR

Lol I still have that blue dual head screwdriver too!

 

[Palladium]

Personally used? (note the all Rubicon caps, and cheaper than Asus, MSI, Gigabyte etc)

If I had started the hobby earlier it would be the BH6...They used to be so good until the A64 days in terms of OCing and price that it's a no brainer on which mobo manufacturer to pick.

 

[Tatty_Two]

Another I owned a long time back, Asrock S939 "Dual", now there was innovation back then, it has both PCI-E and an AGP slot!.............

http://www.asrock.com/mb/ULi/939Dual-SATA2/

 

[Aquinus]

Another I owned a long time back, Asrock S939 "Dual", now there was innovation back then, it has both PCI-E and an AGP slot!.............

http://www.asrock.com/mb/ULi/939Dual-SATA2/

I had something like that but it was on a skt775 board with a Pentium 4 630. It wasn't too bad, but asrock butchered the board by not giving me control of CPU voltage so I couldn't overclock more then 200Mhz. I had a grudge against ASRock for a while after that.

 

[hat]

Intel D865PERL

Even though it was a limited board, and I never did any sort of overclocking with it (main system anyway, I did clock my GPU) it was with this board that my interest in computers really picked up and I began to learn most of what I know now! Also this was my first upgrade since I got really interested in PC gaming... I previously had a 2.8GHz P4 with some other board... I believe it was a 533MHz FSB chip. We tried to upgrade to a 3.0 800MHz chip, but the board didn't take it, so we got this board as an afterthought. I was quite excited to watch my uncle work on my computer at the time and install this stuff for me.

It was also my first casualty... somehow I fried the AGP port. I had a power supply that whined with an XFX 6800XT, but not with my old PNY Verto FX5200 Ultra I was upgrading from. The sound drove me mad, I was constantly swapping the cards back and forth thinking I was going nuts because nobody else could hear the sound... my parents couldn't hear it when I complained to them about it, and then I said "well maybe you can't hear it because of your age it's a really high frequency sound" and they got mad cause they thought I was calling them old! Perhaps I inadvertently did call them old but it was the truth and I can't really think of a nicer way to say it... it was then when I started to focus a lot of attention on power supplies and after some research I later got a Corsair VX450w and was then quite happy. I took the brands Silverstone, Seasonic, and Corsair (made by Seasonic anyways, at least they were at the time) to heart at that time as trustworthy brands. Of course with the PSU world being such a clusterfuck of "this PSU is this brand but it's actually made by these people with these components" and so on I'll always do research on any individual PSU I'm considering before I buy one.

 

[Schmuckley]

That's not me..that's Alatar..but..whatever.. Crosshair V!
When all else fails,Crosshair V will not

tbh ..for 0 problems I'm liking the Maximus 7 Gene ..boots fast..(when you don't do super-training..lol) stable..starts every time!

err...It's under there,somewhere.

 

[Tatty_Two]

I had something like that but it was on a skt775 board with a Pentium 4 630. It wasn't too bad, but asrock butchered the board by not giving me control of CPU voltage so I couldn't overclock more then 200Mhz. I had a grudge against ASRock for a while after that.

That was the same with mine but there was a hard mod to give a fixed higher VCore depending on what regulator you used, I got an electronics repair guy I know to do it for me so I got a little more juice.

 

[Aquinus]

That was the same with mine but there was a hard mod to give a fixed higher VCore depending on what regulator you used, I got an electronics repair guy I know to do it for me so I got a little more juice.

The fact is that it erked me since I had worse and cheaper boards that could do more. That made me move to MSI for boards for a little while. The MSI 975X Platnum Power Up edition wasn't too bad, I liked that board. My friend still has it and works great. He's bad about cleaning the tower out, so I don't both OC'ing it for him. Unfortunately the entire time I owned it, I didn't have cooling good enough to really see how far that E6600 and 975X could go, but never got the chance.