Gigabyte or Asus, What to buy?

[keithlm]

So...UD5 or UD7?

If you go UD7 MAKE SURE your case will hold the extra large UD7 motherboard. (It is longer than a normal ATX board and not a lot of cases can hold it.)


I have considered the UD7 because I have a nice big Xaser case and I like the look of the passive heatsink on this board. (Or if I had this board... I might be "forced" finally buy a good water cooling system just because the darn board had the water cooled heatsink built into it.)

But I am cautious because I have a bad history with Gigabyte: I bought their 790FX-DS5 which they basically orphaned after they figured out that they couldn't make it work correctly with newer chips. Later I did end up with the 790GP-UD4H even after swearing I'd pluck out my own beating heart before ever buying Gigabyte again... but an emergency board blowup made me buy what was available locally. And I must admit the UD4H is a very solid board.

I have accepted that every company sometimes releases lemons; the DS5 was a definite lemon. Several others on this forum can agree with me on that assessment of the DS5. So the idea of buying the UD7 makes me cautious. I'm sure it is okay, but I'd hate to buy it, and have Gigabyte orphan it early because it wasn't very popular because of it's slightly larger size.


I also agree with Lightman, Gigabyte has terrible BIOS update histories. ASUS puts out at least twice as many BIOS in the same amount of time as Gigabyte for similar boards. I had to wait until about the end of May to get a BIOS that would allow the X6 chips on my 790GP-UD4H. Of course since I've decided to get a new 890FX board that doesn't really bother me. (But I was a bit angry with them telling me they needed time for validation. As if they hadn't received X6 chips for testing and validation MONTHS before release. Jerks.)

BUT it does seem that Gigabyte takes longer to test and validate, which is good and bad. Bad because you have to wait forever to get a new bios which is awful if you have a problem. But that is good if you don't have a problem because when they do release a BIOS it is probably better tested and validated than what ASUS puts out.

Since I don't really have a history with ASUS I can't really comment on them. I do like some of the features on the Crosshair IV that Gigabyte doesn't have. That is why I'm attempting to wait for the Crosshair IV Extreme which should have the best of both; plus I can play with Hydra. But I'm getting impatient....