Intel chipsets or not?

[FU_MAN]

There is a lot of talk about incompatibilities with chips/chipsets and video cards, third party software and general everyday usage. The big thing seems to be Intel chips are better for compatibility but on the same note you can say that a lot of problems are due to chipsets on the motherboard. So my questions are:

How reliable are Pentium motherboards based on third party chipsets?

I really like some of the boards that ASUS is offering, and many of them are getting good marks from sites like Anandtech, but are there problems that we are not hearing about?

Is this something that I need to worry about?
Thanks.

[Darren Wilson]

I myself, do not like using third party non-intel chipsets with Intel processors. I have seen too many problems in my time with compatibility errors and such. I will stand up for the third party chipsets in that 9/10 times they are actually faster than Intels equivalent, but speed is not everything is it??? I would much rather a system go out of the shop door with confidence that we will not see it again unless the user screws something up or they want an upgrade thasn to ship out the fastest system available and end up with it in the shop every other day.

As for Motherboards, I have used Asus parts in teh past and do not like them. I personally have had 4 P2B baords in my system which kept dying on me for no reason within 8 weeks. Changed the board for a Gigabyte GA6-BX2000 and the system has worked fine for over a year now without any problems (apart formt eh primary bios packing up but the board is still usable by using the secondary bios to boot). I myself now will only use Abit & QDI mainboards in teh shop I now work in. Cannot not honestly say that I have had many probs with these companies recently, and I will sitck by them. I like the QDI boards simply because you can change the boot screen to personalise your systems Gimmicks, I luv'em

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[Hlodh]

Well, that is the first time I have ever heard a single complaint in my entire career about ASUS boards. I'm not finding fault with your observations at all; I'm just amazed that it's taken this long for a single bad comment to reach me. I'm fascinated by all this. Their P2B MBs were the workhorses of the industry at one time, and all of their MBs based on the 440BX chipset have always been highly rated. Have you heard other complaints about their products? What were they?

[Darren Wilson]

They did have some compatibility problems with their Riva 128ZX based video card (Asus V3000 Xplorer I think cannot be certain ) and their LX based boards. This was a common problem though throughout the industry so they cannot be blamed for that. But like a lot of people I am very 'once bitten , twice shy' when it comes down to components.

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[FU_MAN]

I think we are going off topic...maybe the wording of my questions.

What I want to know is how well to Slot1 and socket370 boards work with non intel chipsets?