Treloar wrote: ↑27 May 2018, 04:13
Apparently, alot of the newer CPU's on the market of late are not supported natively by the motherboards you can buy, unless you flash the BIOS.
That's the price you pay for forwards compatibility, much better than the Intel approach of offering very short lifecycles for motherboards by releasing incompatible CPUs in quick succession.
If Mugsy is only going to have the PC another year or two I doubt aluminum electrolytic caps will be a factor.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/c ... de-rating/
I still see business PC's from the 2000's with perfectly working aluminum electrolytic caps, most of these motherboards used aluminum electrolytic caps from reputable sources so don't suffer from the issues consumer boards did with fake poor quality aluminum electrolytic caps and bad layout where caps were close to sources of heat like the CPU HSF.
Pentium IV motherboards had a deservedly bad reputation but since the end of the Pentium IV and the capacitor plague the situation has been overblown.
The reality is that in most applications aluminum electrolytic caps will outlast the effective useful life of whatever device they are utilised in.
I have used ASRock motherboards and I would say they're no better but certainly no worse than other consumer entry level motherboards, from a hardware standpoint they normally follow very safe, generic layouts and will likely last 5 years of frequent use assuming there isn't another issue at play like a faulty PSU and/or brownouts.
ASRock often don't release BIOS updates with any frequency and BIOS update support is often quickly dropped but it's not as if the renders the motherboards useless.
The big criticism I have of ASRock and this also extends to ASUS is that they use ASMedia SATA controllers that have a variety of issues including poor interoperability with devices and compatibility issues with Linux. Even when using Windows with the latest drivers turning on devices connected to the ASMedia SATA controller has caused numerous PCs to hang and/or hang in the process of copying data to an attached USB drive.
if I'm setting up a motherboard with an ASMedia SATA controller I make sure all SATA devices are connected to the Intel SATA controller and disable the ASMedia SATA controller.
Gigabyte generally make solid boards but every so often they release a lemon normally when they've tried a more exotic board layout.
Motherboards RAM compatibility issues weren't uncommon in the 2000's, my ASUS P5B-E didn't like my high frequency RAM so every time I had to reset BIOS I'd have to install lower frequency generic RAM then change BIOS settings before re-installing original RAM. I only bought said high frequency RAM because this was during 2006 during the peak of the RAM price fixing scandal when it was impossible to find generic RAM, after that I said to myself "I'm never spending ~$385 on RAM again".
ASUS are increasingly placing pointless chips on their high end motherboards in a likely attempt to justify their price premium.
Recently I looked at an ASUS Z97-A motherboard, the original PSU had died and with replacement PSUs was displaying "Power Supply surges detected during the previous power on, ASUS Anti-Surge was triggered to protect system from unstable power supply unit, Press F1 to Run Setup.". There was nothing wrong with said PSUs and the ASUS Anti-Surge was failing PSUs within ATX standard power spec.
In such a case you're not only paying a premium for these rubbish add-on chips but they're a potential source of issues.
Eventually I found a PSU the Z97-A liked, ironically a mid-range 550W PSU when previously I'd been trying higher-end and higher wattage PSUs.
More expensive doesn't necessarily = better.
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