Who's Good About BIOS / Driver Updates?

[DaveLH]

I suspect that the problems I've been having (See: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/365977-33-hard-diagnose-graphics-card-problem) have at least been partly due to the fact that ASUS stopped providing BIOS and chipset driver updates for my M3A78 mobo back in 2010. I am considering now building a new system, and I wondered if there any other high-quality mobo manufacturers who are better about continuing to provide BIOS and driver updates over the long-term, rather than just abandoning support after a year or two.

I used to be an Epox advocate until they went under, and used an ASUS on my current system based on someone's recommendation. Any suggestions here would be appreciated.

Dave

 

[Raiddinn]

Asus level is about as good as it is going to get.

AFAIK, it isn't as much about chipset updates as much as the new boards just have stuff not physically present on the older ones. You can't update in actual hardware.

At least if you stick with Gigabyte or Asus you have a maker with a long track record of making high quality boards. MSI, ECS, and other cheapy brand boards often break sooner than 2 years anyway. More often than the quality board makers do anyway.

Computer hardware is meant to have about a 3 year upgrade cycle anyway. You might as well get used to that. It is better to buy a $120 board now and another $120 board in 3 years than to pay $240 now for a board and try to hold out with it for 6 years. So much so that the comparison can't even really be made.

 

[Pinhedd]

I suspect that the problems I've been having (See: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/365977-33-hard-diagnose-graphics-card-problem) have at least been partly due to the fact that ASUS stopped providing BIOS and chipset driver updates for my M3A78 mobo back in 2010. I am considering now building a new system, and I wondered if there any other high-quality mobo manufacturers who are better about continuing to provide BIOS and driver updates over the long-term, rather than just abandoning support after a year or two.

I used to be an Epox advocate until they went under, and used an ASUS on my current system based on someone's recommendation. Any suggestions here would be appreciated.

Dave

You're not going to get anything better than Asus, period. As Raiddinn said, a firmware update won't add support for something that doesn't physically exist on the board. The firmware's job is to get the system into a state from which the OS can take over. After that, the firmware's job is done and almost all of it is actually unloaded by the operating system and replaced by the operating system's own drivers. Only a few things are left intact after the boot process is complete, and these are things that the OS usually doesn't need to touch at all.

 

[Borochadwicsays]

My experience is that my motherboard BIOS hasn't fixed my problems on my Intel board.