Furious_Styles
Supreme [H]ardness
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Yeah but a ferrari actually gives you more performance, those boards really don't. Not saying you should buy a $200 board but those are just laughably overpriced.
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What Z690 board are you eyeing?
- Thread starter Nirad9er
- Start date
Well, they don't necessarily do anything more for you overclocking wise given that most chips now a days don't really gain much from it. However, nicer boards have 10GbE LAN, nicer audio, etc. that some of us like. Higher end boards are more about features than performance these days. Although, they can still technically overclock better than your cheaper boards but most people will never see that as they won't run LN2 or anything along those lines.
Let's also face it, in a lot of cases you are also paying for looks. A lot of people care about that even if most of the people on these forums say otherwise. Motherboard manufacturers have done a lot of research on this.
therealjustin
Limp Gawd
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Where is the Z690 Aorus Pro DDR4?! 
I now have 2 boards, not sure which is better
MSI MPG Z690 Carbon and Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Ultra
Originally I was planning to just use the MSI board, but had no ram, got lucky the other day and was able to get a combo deal on newegg and finally got some DDR5.
Which board is better?
MSI MPG Z690 Carbon and Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Ultra
Originally I was planning to just use the MSI board, but had no ram, got lucky the other day and was able to get a combo deal on newegg and finally got some DDR5.
Which board is better?
Gigabyte motherboards are perfectly fine motherboards. See you have it in for them because of their PSU fiasco, which was indeed handled poorly.
Though you cannot conclude that the mainboards are bad too. That is a completely uninformed statement. The PSU's are just branded Gigabyte and they have nothing to do with the manufacturing part of it. The motherboards on the other hand are from their own manufacturing.
I have a Gigabyte board now, Z690 UD DDR4, completely stable, BIOS works as it should, same with my Z490 Gaming X board I had before. Nothing different from my Asus P87 board I had before that though. Both good brands, Asus is just a bit overpriced at the moment.
Funny thing is, that the Asus motherboards have more issues with their BIOSes with the Z690 series.
I ended up with the Z690 Aorus Master DDR5. I tried the Asus Z690 Hero and was not impressed with the build quality for the price and returned it. The Gigabyte board has a huge backplate covering the whole backside and felt solid. The Asus board is indeed overpriced. If we didn't have the DDR4 boards taking up the lower price bracket then the DDR5 boards wouldn't be so upcharged. Asus clearly took advantage of this because the Hero board never had ultra premium pricing. I'll probably never try another Asus board based on how the company has took advantage of this entire market. They have the highest pandemic priced graphics cards by far and clearly did the same for their motherboards.
Furious_Styles
Supreme [H]ardness
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Yeah I agree totally, they are certainly gouging a bit.
thedream829
Limp Gawd
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Only reason I even upgrade.
Nasgul
n00b
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There ya go........listen to what he says and the title of the BIOS:
And pay close attention to 12:25
Gigasucks motherboards are perfectly fine for NON-K CPUs and if you put in a K, overclocking is futile. Yes, who wants that? The ones who want "perfectly fine" products.
Pretty useless video since it is about three generations ago, seems that in teh Z690 era Asucks has dropped the ball, all manufacturers have sorted their issues with BIOS updates, except Asucks:
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Captain Newmackwa
Limp Gawd
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With GPUs using up to three slots and Z690 motherboards seemingly getting less PCIE x4 and no x8 slots, my plan of installing a Mellanox ConnectX-3 10G NIC and an Asus ThunderboltEX 4 expansion card on my ASUS TUF Z690-Plus Wifi D4 fell through. I had to resort to just using the Sonnet Solo SFP+ Thunderbolt3 external NIC that I was previously using with my MacBook Pro instead.
I really wish motherboard manufacturers would put x4 and x8 slots at the bottom of the board instead of x1 and m.2 slots.
I really wish motherboard manufacturers would put x4 and x8 slots at the bottom of the board instead of x1 and m.2 slots.
NukeDukem
2[H]4U
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I went with the ASRock Z690 EXTREME DDR4 . I love the look of it. So now I have the board, 12900k, Liquid Freezer II 360mm AIO, and a new beQuiet Silent Base 802 case, all ready to build... aaand I'm waiting on the LGA 1700 mounting bracket from Arctic. So I'll probably be sitting here looking at these pretty boxes for another 2 weeks.
No PCIE lanes for the slots if they included them.
z590 gigabyte boards work fine, don't have a z690 one yet though as the tachyon is not available at the moment. I wouldn't listen to anything steve says about bios anyway, he's not an overclocker but a hardware reviewer and they don't spend much time with things. Most people that say other brands bios "suck" usually only buy 1 brand so they just don't feel like spending the time to look around and see where the settings are. The only one that really doesn't give you settings other ones have is evga which just leaves out a bunch of stuff.
kirbyrj
Fully [H]
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He only buys Asus/Intel combos. He bad mouths anything that isn't an Asus/Intel combo. I blocked that clown a long time ago.
I generally prefer Asus because I'm most familiar with their bioses. I've had some GB boards that were perfectly fine. I just don't use them as often.
I don't really like EVGA motherboards. I will use them if its the only thing available or I get a super good deal used, but I don't go out of my way to use them.
Captain Newmackwa
Limp Gawd
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AFAIK, Z690 and ADL have more lanes compared to prior generations. It’s really up to the motherboard manufacturers on how they‘ll allocate those lanes for different board models. By giving up an M.2 slot, the TUF Z690 could’ve yielded an additional PCIE x4 slot from the PCH and I would still have three M.2 slots left on the motherboard which is plenty enough for me.
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Furious_Styles
Supreme [H]ardness
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Nasgul is basically a troll at this point, not even worth engaging with him.
I can’t speak to the chipset, but ADL has the same as before - just the first 16 are 5.0. The link to the chipset is still x4; overloading thwt is relatively pointless, drives are a little different since you don’t tend to be doing massive transfers back to the CPU with them. If you want a bunch of lanes, you sadly have to buy HEDT.
I get what you’re saying, but you’re a somewhat limited market. Either snag a bird with 10G built in (what I tend to do) or buy HEDT (which I also do).
edit: I'm wrong. See below.
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Captain Newmackwa
Limp Gawd
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I just found out that the Gigabyte AERO D Z690 DDR4 board that comes with Thunderbolt ports and 10G Ethernet recently became available. It's even got better onboard sound. I should have gone with that.
The X8 DMI 4.0 link has twice the bandwidth of the DMI 3.0 used in Z590 chipset.
Intel finally has a decent amount of PCIe links to go around with Alder Lake/Z690.
Forgot about them bumping that. I knew the CPU links were still limited to the same (that x4 is for the first NVMe), but once I decided to pass on 690 I forgot that they had bumped the DMI link too. Still somewhat limited since a lot of the links from the PCH are lower speed, but depending on what you want to put there…. Its a damned good platform, but by the time win11 hits the year mark, we’ll be looking at x699 and z790.
I’m still curious about x699 too.
We all have history that makes us wary of certain combos (I tend to avoid Gigabyte/AMD unless necessary, and I'm not super fond of MSI/Intel), but he does take it to a bit of an extreme.
Gigabyte makes excellent hardware, in general - they've had bad releases, and imho, they push the limits a ~little~ too much at times for AMD processors (which tend to be more finicky than Intel), which is the reason my history with them sucks (NF3 memory spec, 990FX "worst motherboard ever," etc). ASUS makes for excellent boards that push the limits just the right amount, but you pay for that privilege and their RMA sucks ass for most things. But Asus has had very bad boards too.
SOAREVERSOR
Gawd
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I'm waiting on the EVGA FTW still, though I noticed they cracked out an x570 FTW as well. I know people don't really care for them but I sort appreciate the minimalist take and I've had less issues with EVGA boards than the other brands all in all. That said I do miss DFI, EVGA, SOYO, and some of the other older brands that are no longer about.
My experience with EVGA boards is that they're the ultimate overclockers, but zero user friendly features. And generally lacking in most "nice to have" features too, but I don't pay a ton of attention to them.
I can't speak to what Steve is or isn't as I don't know him personally. However, I am a reviewer and I overclock. Granted, during the context of a review we don't get a lot of time with the hardware, but I upgrade just about every generation and do overclock my own CPU's. Part of the reason why I upgrade every generation is because having the hardware in my own system and trying to squeeze the most out of it teaches me things I might have missed just reviewing things. Aside from that, it gives me other benefits like doing longer term testing, etc.
I've had GIGABYTE, MSI, EVGA, and ASUS in all my personal machines. ASRock being the only major manufacturer I haven't used in my personal machines before. Early on when a new platform/chipset is released, there is always a learning curve to it as well so you have to keep that in mind. But to be fair, the UEFI for each of these companies hasn't changed in a long time with the exception of GIGABYTE's, which changes more frequently due to the interface being arguably worse than the others and not being well received.
All of that said, I think ASUS has the best UEFI in terms of layout and ease of use. There are individual aspects of the UEFI that are better on other brands, but overall I think ASUS has pretty much always had the best implementation. There is a reason why the other motherboard manufacturers have copied many of ASUS' features or even the layout of ASUS UEFI menus. Features that did indeed appear on ASUS boards first. The EZ Mode menu, the wizards, SSD erase tool, and a few other things all appeared on ROG boards in particular before the entire industry started doing the same things. Specific overclocking profiles for memory or CPU's were on ASUS boards first. Now, just about everyone has those things on some models.
I've seen good and bad motherboards from every manufacturer. At certain periods, there are boards I wouldn't use from every manufacturer. Before I was a reviewer, from the late 1996 to 2006 I worked as a computer technician in different places. Although I went into IT full time in 2000, I worked part time as a service technician at Comp USA. Back in the Athlon 64 and earlier days GIGABYTE was the brand I probably saw the most failures on of the brands that survive to this day. I saw a ton of bad ECS and PCChips boards as well. I saw countless Soyo, abit, and EpoX boards shit the bed from capacitor issues or other problems as well.
And oh yes, I remember the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 I think it was which I named among the worst motherboards ever. That thing was a total piece of trash. Not because the hardware was bad, I don't think it was. However, it's firmware and BIOS were egregiously bad. To the point where the board was basically unusable at launch. This wasn't entirely their fault but GIGABYTE was worse off than everyone else. The reason is that the 990FX boards launched without Bulldozer CPU's as they were delayed. The problem with that is they were really optimized from a firmware perspective for those newer CPU's and you couldn't use them. What people didn't understand is that having that much microcode for broader CPU compatibility is problematic.
But again, every company has had terrible motherboards. ASUS' ROG Striker Extreme and Striker Extreme II were a pieces of shit. They were actually better than the reference counterparts but still bad. There were chipset issues with those and that's on NVIDIA, not ASUS. The ASUS' boards were worse about memory clocking and compatibility than other boards of the era though. I have come to realize that this probably saved them from dying as fast as the reference boards, but at the time that's one of the reasons I reviewed them poorly. ASUS' Crosshair VI (one of the Crosshairs) I think it was is another huge piece of shit that we killed three of at HardOCP. It was a bad design and this thought was validated when ASUS practically abandoned it and didn't give it the BIOS upgrades to support newer CPU's when other boards of the era did.
MSI's X570-A Pro is notorious for how bad it is. Granted, I've actually had good experiences with it but the VRM's are inadequate for the 12 and 16 core CPU's and overclocking them is almost out of the question. Of course, given the reputation of its low end boards at the time, MSI created the X570 Tomahawk and X570 Unify, which were among the best X570's ever produced. The X570 GODLIKE was great despite some firmware issues.
At different times, different motherboard makers do things that are good or bad. At one point, ASUS was using the same VRM implementation across its entire product stack. You could buy a lower and motherboard and get the same VRM's you'd find on the higher end boards. Now, GIGABYTE is doing that on the Z690's. In the Z390 days, if you bought the Maximus XI Formula, you were getting a surprisingly weak VRM implementation for such expensive motherboards. It had the same VRM as the Hero and cost around $500 which was nonsense. I can literally go on and on with examples of these sorts of things. Suffice it to say, brand loyalty doesn't make much sense as all of these companies have produced a few turds here and there or engaged in less than ethical marketing practices. All of the major manufacturers have also produced some absolutely fantastic boards as well.
DFI and Soyo were crap. EVGA is really hit and miss, but that's a longer conversation.
Come at me bro!
SOAREVERSOR
Gawd
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DFI and Soyo were crap. EVGA is really hit and miss, but that's a longer conversation.
Come at me bro!
Shit, I should have put Abit where I put the first EVGA,.
DFI and Soyo died so I'll leave them dead. What I did have from DFI at least was pretty good, I'd say they were hit or miss. I still have good luck with EVGA and I've had too many disasters with ASUS and gigabyte by now to trust them.
I built a lot of systems with well reviewed and well liked DFI motherboards and their quality was inconsistent to say the least. Any board that requires manual tuning to run properly is a piece of shit and I'll always stand by that statement. EVGA is a complicated and mixed bag. It has produced some fantastic boards, but it's also made a lot of mistakes too.
SOAREVERSOR
Gawd
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I always figured DFI was pushing boards for people that liked tuning and tinkering. I've yet to have a dud from EVGA and their support is easier to deal with. I'm loving the z490 I have and I'll be getting the 690 as well. I go for the FTW series though.
Went through a few bad ECS boards, and same for EpoX and Soyo. Abit tended to be better, but I was poor back then and only built occasionally so I had limited exposure.
Yep. And there were hardware issues too - there were (IIRC) 6 different versions of that board as they tried to get it stable, and they never, ever, did. I've still got it sitting here - refuse to sell it, because no one should go through that shit. I haven't lit it on fire yet because I just haven't had time. The 990FX was a mediocre platform in general, but the UD7 was one of the worst implementations of it for sure. Even with Bulldozer and the last BIOS revisions. Hell, you had to use a PS/2 keyboard to interact with the BIOS!
Yep. This is why you read reviews and research. I shy away from Gigabyte + AMD because of my history, but I ~have~ an x570 Elite and it's working perfectly with a 3950X in it. I did a ton of research, the reviews were good, and the price was right. I gave it a shot. Been almost totally happy - had one issue with power and it liking to reset after boot at idle, but a BIOS update with a new setting (literally "flip this if it resets at idle" - ROFL) fixed it. Zero complaints after that, and it always worked fine once it was under load.
They were, but they also didn't like to run at STOCK settings unless you tuned. You had to tweak the shit out of them to get them stable period - the fact that you could then repeat that at an absurd overclock... well, that's a trade off, but if you wanted stability at stock first (or only), not always a good pick. They also liked to die a lot.
That was what people often believed but plenty of other motherboards were just as capable but worked at stock speeds. I remember DFI leaving a lot of settings exposed that other manufacturers had hidden, but those settings rarely if ever allowed you to achieve an overclock that you couldn't duplicate on another board just as easily or more easily.
SOAREVERSOR
Gawd
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I went from an abit bp6 to an ASUS AN78X to an abit ic7-g to a DFI NF4 Ultra back in the day. No problems with any. To be fair, I never had mobo problems till the Striker Extreme which was a doozy.
Well, I was a computer technician and system builder before I was a reviewer. I have seem multiple copies of the DFI nForce 4 boards and only one out of them ever worked right. I could make most of them work with tuning, but the QC was so bad that tuning steps were on a per board basis even with similar hardware. I built two identical systems once that didn't behave remotely the same. I grew to hate those DFI boards despite what the reviews said.
Yeah mostly the point is they have better things to do with their time than spend hours and hours every day in bios tuning esoteric things lol. I don't expect that from reviewers.
good to know
Well, we do. You only get to spend a couple weeks at most with a motherboard. Prior to launches, you get even less time in most cases. 7-10 days is what I've usually experienced.
D
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I had a few Soyo boards, but never cared much for them, and I owned one DFI Intel board that was great, and lasted me a long time with no issues. I was a big Abit user in the AMD Athlon days (with an occasional Epox board thrown in) and even used them with Intel cpu's, but then they went belly up so I moved onto Gigabyte and haven't had any issues with their hardware at all. Asus I haven't had much luck with over the years. I did try a board with the Z490 chipset and had issues with it so I returned that board.
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Gawd
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Having grown up messing with jumpers and IRQs it never bothered me, though it might now. And the other side is I've seen bonkers behavior from other boards as well. Case in point I couldn't get ASUS or GIgabyte boards to detect my U.2 drives despite them having U.2 ports. The EVGA did. I've mostly stuck with them due to the fact that I've had memory and U.2 issues with all of the big brands but them.
TBH I don't really care for reviews now much. Unless there is a glaring issue it's not going to tell you much. At this point most things perform pretty much the same where it counts and the price points are simply throwing features on that in most cases I'm not going to use. And the specific stuff I do use isn't going to be covered anyways. There's a price point and features arms race right now that I find kinda laughable. I mean I get it, but tossing 500+ at a board and not throwing down for a quality DAC AMP I find sort of odd but then again that invalidates the whatever audio solution they bolted on to win points in a review.
Furious_Styles
Supreme [H]ardness
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I kinda agree. I paid like $250 for my current board (Z370 aorus gaming 7) which has a great feature set and more than I really need tbh. But now z690 equivalent is like $500, that's just ridiculous.
As a reviewer I used pretty much all the major boards from MSI, GIGABYTE and ASUS for every generation over the last 15 years. Though, I didn't do much with Z590 as it was about the least exciting time in motherboards that I can remember. That being said, I never had issues with U.2 drive detection and did use U.2 drives at the time. All Intel drives, but they were by far the most common U.2 drive on the consumer market at the time. I think I've still got one of their 400GB U.2 drives floating around somewhere.
EVGA has been seriously hit and miss with motherboards in my experience. EVGA boards are typically quirky as hell. Their physical construction is slightly better than ASRock's but they price their boards like they are GIGABYTE or MSI. Most of the time the issues I've encountered with them were firmware related. But, it's funny you mention U.2 issues because I've had tons of issues with EVGA and SAS controllers or 10GbE network cards. EVGA does minimal QVL testing and only does a fraction of what ASUS does for example.