Now 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.
I 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.<p>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.)
I 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.
I 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)<p>The author fails to understand some things:<p><i>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).<p>...<p>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.</i><p>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.<p>(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)
Ha. 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.
Looking 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.<p>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.
What does the article mean by the "end" of desktop boards? Is it the end of sockets accepting multiple generations of CPUs?<p>I can see that it's not entirely true either, Socket 1151 supports both Skylake and Kaby Lake: <a href="http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z390%20Phantom%20Gaming%20X/index.asp" rel="nofollow">http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z390%20Phantom%20Gaming%20X/index...</a><p>What change did actually take place?
I 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.