Which MB maker has the stablest BIOS and good USB thumb drive support

mrblint said:

The reason I bought a Gigabyte MB was because I'd seen many reviews that spoke favorably of them, as you do here. I've spent about an hour on the phone with Gigabyte tech support all told, on two separate occasions this past week. They were generous with their time and seemed eager to help, and I was happy to find they had the "we can call you back" feature. But the AMI BIOS for this board is truly flaky in respect to its detection of bootable devices attached to USB. The MB in question GA-Z270M-D3H. I've tried BIOS version F7, and the version before that, and their latest, which as I recall has an 8 in its number but isn't called F8. The BIOS also doesn't jibe with the DRAM slots as labeled on the MB. It treats the slot labeled DDR4_4 on the MB as slot #1 and the slot labeled DDR4_1 as slot #4.

From what you describe makes no sense. I've a few Gigabyte (Z87, Z170, Z270, Z390) boards with the UEFI bios and never had an issue where I needed something plugged into the front port in order to get the motherboard's back ports to work. I don't care what board we're talking about, that's not supposed to happen, and it's extremely odd. Sounds like you need to check your USB cable going to the front ports. The first thing you should try if that's happening is disconnect the front headers (USB cable) from the motherboard, then try the thumb drive again.

As for Gigabyte's tech support, I've dealt with them in the past and would say they're ok. Speaking of tech support (actually customer service) it was Asus who drove me to Gigabyte.

Anyway, I would never tell anyone not to buy an Asus board because they are good motherboards; I just prefer Gigabyte boards (which are also pretty good). Though I do wish Gigabyte had Asus's UEFI layout.

Oh, and speaking of layout, you might revisit your owner's manual to figure out Gigabyte's UEFI layout.

Well, I've finally got Windows 10 installed but was unable to do so from flash drive. Had to burn a DVD.

There are plenty plenty plenty of reports about problems booting from flash drive with Gigabyte motherboards, so whether my report of flakiness "makes sense" to you or not, those are the facts. It might not be limited to Gigabyte for all I know. They might be no better or no worse than the rest of the industry in this regard.

I found this posting while Googling for solutions:

"I can't believe we're having these problems in 2010!"

Yes, 2010. Well, another nine years have gone by and the problems still exist.

My last desktop system had a Gigabyte motherboard. Was never too happy with the USB performance through the BIOS. I've been using only only laptop computers a while now, but at the time it was win7 on MBR. Had to use an NTFS file system on the boot media, actually would not boot off fat32, thought that was pretty lame.

Installing Windows on that system was like watching paint dry, it literally took that thing five minutes to boot and load Windows setup over USB. Once Windows setup took over it was fine.

So I've not been impressed with how the Gigabyte BiOS deals with USB drives. Generally the quality is good with Gigabyte products, but that USB thing is kind of a showstopper. Sounds like it's still an issue a decade later.

Never used Asus or MSI boards. And Gigabyte has never given me a reason to look elsewhere. I guess after 5 builds with 5 different Gigabyte boards (X58, Z87, Z170, Z270, and Z390) I must be lucky

I vote for ASUS and ASRock. Have had great success with both and it seems that ASRock implements more features than ASUS does. Just my opinion though!