[KatsuyaKaiba]

I'm having an ongoing tiff with my friend.

I recently read in a men's magazine that Motherboards practicly last an eternity, meanwhile, my friend says they last only a couple years.

Who's correct?

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LoL it can last a long time itself but in technical terms, a motherboard is only good for up to a year or two then is really outdated. Time to get a new pc by then.

Your never going to stay up with technology. It keeps getting faster and better.

Edited by jrm20, 18 November 2005 - 09:00 PM.

[jrm20]

LoL it can last a long time itself but in technical terms, a motherboard is only good for up to a year or two then is really outdated. Time to get a new pc by then.

Your never going to stay up with technology. It keeps getting faster and better.

Edited by jrm20, 18 November 2005 - 09:00 PM.

[KatsuyaKaiba]

LoL it can last a long time itself but in technical terms, a motherboard is only good for up to a year or two then is really outdated. Time to get a new pc by then.

Your never going to stay up with technology. It keeps getting faster and better.

Yeah..but she was talking they only last a couple years before they blow out.

[jrm20]

No i still see people on slow pc's pentium 133mhz.... from 1995

[KatsuyaKaiba]

No i still see people on slow pc's pentium 133mhz.... from 1995

Alright, thank you for the help!

[Samm]

It varys a lot. It also depends on how the board is treated, for example, static will rarely cause a board to fail immediately but can reduce it's life expectancy.

A faulty or bad protected power supply can often cause a board to fail, but this is obviously the fault of the PSU not the actual board.

A motherboard which has been well handled & has a good quality power supply 'should' last for years in theory. The only other problems you sometimes experience with older boards (i.e after prolonged usage) are things like dry joints, where an electronic component loses connectivity (which results in increased resistance) with the actual PCB etc. These can often be re-soldered though, providing they can be identified.

[jrm20]

Good point samm.

[Doby]

yep Samm you pretty much nailed that down, its so important to have a good psu and handle the board properly

In my opinion the dry joint syndrome is caused by heating up and cooling down, this usually is not a problem if the board is left intact. But in the real world we are always adding something such as ram, pci devices or upgrading the cpu witch by installing such components puts a certain amount of flex in the board thus puting stess on the board causing a joint to eventually fail even if its not apparent right away but down the road something happens that just can't be explained

So proper handling is critical when changing components, this is all so true with pci devices. I have seen many motherboards and cpu's for that matter with proper care last untill they become obsolete and then some if they are kept in service.

I don't believe that leaving computers run all the time has any affect on how long motherboards or cpu's last in fact leaving them run may take away that dry joint affect because they are not heating up and cooling down but the more constent temp keeps things more flexable.

Rick

[Neil Jones]

Motherboards are exactly the same as any other PC Component; you get ones that last five minutes and you get ones that run for years.

I have a (very) old Socket 7 motherboard from nearly ten years ago now; it runs fine. Whereas I bought a Socket A board about 18 months ago and it was dead out of the box.

[Jo Franklin]

My P1 100MHz from a 1995 laptop still works, and that laptop has been bashed around something rotten!

[Tyger]

The oldest machine I have right now, I collect older small machines, has a BIOS date of 1992. It has an AMD486D2-80 processor, with the original win3.1 and ms-dos 5.0 on it. It works just fine, and very crisply. I was actually able to find the motherboard manual on line. It's home built.