Motherboard lifespan
 

I recently purchased a new motherboard. The last two I had only lasted about 2 years tops. What can I do so that this new one has a longer lifespan? I don't do anything intensive, just gaming and internet for the most part.

Wait... you mean they actually die on you?

Maybe not heat them up over 100 degrees celcius? Dunno... I have never lost a mainboard in 15 years of pc building.
Either your power supply sucks, you only buy china grade quality, or there are mainboard eating ants living in your house.

Same, I haven't ever had a motherboard fail on me, and I have some that's been in daily use for like seven or eight years now. What brands do you usually buy? It seems unlikely these days, but at least for your first one you could have been a victim of the Great Capacitor Plague, I guess. See also http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=5

Things I have had fail on me are fans, HDD's, PSU's, monitors (CRT only, so far) and in one case a GPU.

Make sure the board is using solid capacitors as standard, and that you are using a good PSU and a UPS to keep the power clean and stable; I've seen boards have bloated caps because the owner(s) didn't use a UPS and plugged their PCs directly into the outlet.

I have literally never used an UPS. Brown-outs and power spikes really aren't A Thing here unless you live way over in the outback and get a lot of thunderstorms or something, but it depends on where you live of course.

I was expieriencing random restarts before the motherboard "died" (I am not 100% sure its dead), but during the time I was trying to figure out why my computer was restarting I was monitoring temps and didn't really motherboard temp go any higher then 50 something.

First one was an ASUS I think. The latest one was ASRock. Both cost me below $100 and lasted about two years a piece. MY PSU should still be good (I tested it using the jump start method where you use a paperclip to plug the green and black pin holes and a CD-rom drive), and its not like I an plugging it directly to a wall socket or am living in an area with a lot of power outages so I am not sure what I am doing wrong here.

My main PSU (I have another one that still works I think maybe) is a CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750

It's not that I never had random restarts either.
Had plenty.
But whenever I got to the bottom of it, by switching out parts between the problem box and another system, it never was the mainboard's fautl in the end.

Power isn't stable in any place and all the time and so I can't trust anything from the power company, unless you're using mid/high-tier PSUs that have complete power stabilization as standard equipment.

Here, because of "dirty" and unstable juice, besides a UPS we very much have to use an AVR -- it acts as additional insurance, moreso than a surge protector.

Since the OP's place has dirty power, he'll have to get a UPS. Pronto as in picking up an APC (brand name), so better to have it than sorry.

Is their some way to make sure my motherboard is dead? Could it really just be that the power strip I have it plugged into normally is messed up and I need to get one of these UPC things? I tried two seperate motherboards and both appeared to be dead

http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=21
Buy this, problem solved.

Also, if possible and if your motherboard is within the warranty period, you can return it for a replacement. That's all.

But is their some way of testing it to make sure 100% that they're both dead

If you've tested your motherboard with a known working CPU and a known working stick of RAM and it still doesn't work, then it's dead. If you do this test you should probably do it with an older CPU you don't value so much though, because if there's a short circuit somewhere there's a possibility (however small) that you could end up frying the CPU.

If the fans whirr to life but you get no beeps from the system speaker, it's not POST'ing (POST = power on self test) for whatever reason and that's usually hard to diagnose; it can be a bunch of different things ranging from broken capacitors to bad RAM to bad PSU. If it starts beeping weird sequences at you, it probably works and is just complaining you don't have a graphics card or something.


Mostly unrelated anecdote: I once had a motherboard that refused to POST; it turned out to be the PSU's fault. According to the ATX specification that power supplies are supposed to adhere to, one of the pins on the power connector is used as a "status report" line. The PSU is supposed to deliver a certain amount of voltage (+/- 10% or something like that) on that pin in order to tell the motherboard that it's operating normally and it's okay to proceed with powering on. My PSU delivered a voltage just under the voltage limit, and thus the motherboard refused to pass the POST because it thought the PSU was broken or not ready yet. The fans would run, but nothing else happened. Since the store I got it at were being assholes about it and refused to replace it because it "worked fine" with their small voltage meter of a PSU tester, I "fixed" it by hardwiring the status report pin to one of the spare +3v lines on the power connector. It worked, and I'm pretty sure my sister's computer is still using that PSU today. "No user serviceable parts inside", maybe, but you can accomplish some interesting things with a voltmeter and a pair of wirecutters even without opening the box.

The above took me two or three days to figure out, one very boring summer week just after I had finished high school.

^I tested it but disconnecting all cables and removing all components except the CPU and the 4 pin connector and the the 20 pin connector and powering it on. Nothing turned on, no fans powered on, nothing. I test the PSU to make sure it was working by doing the "jump start" method and connected one of the wires to a working DVD-ROM drive. The drive turned on and worked normally. Is their some other method of testing the board? I've had this board since 2011 and I find it suspect it would fail on me so quickly

edit:
So hey as it turns out my motherboard is not dead and I am in fact just an idiot. What I did wrong was that I was testing the motherboard simply by connecting the 20 pin connecter to the motherboard and hitting the PSU's switching instead of connecting the case to the board and hitting the power button like any non-developmentally retarded person would do. So if you ever wanted to submit a moment of epic fail to one of those blogs that chronicles such things, you have my permission to do so.

Anyway the main problem I originally had still persist: the random restarts. temps are fine according to Speedfan. PSU is still good. Motherboard is still good. GPU is good as I stress tested it a few days ago and it peaked at 68 I think. RAM should still be good as I ran memtest for 7 hours and found nada. What do now?

What OS are you using ?

:uhoh: Frankly I am surprised it lives this long as seeing the other help threads posted. I'm not sure what you do with your hardware or how the conditions are but normally things do not just "break" imo.

here's a random thought: try unplugging the line that connects the motherboard to the hardware reset button on the case (and try looking for broken capacitors as per above, I guess)

I assume the new motherboard doesn't randomly restart with the same PSU?

New motherboard? Its the same one I assumed was dead. I don't really see any of the capacitors as being bloated or broken. I gave up and took it to a local Staples to see if they could figure it out for me anyway, so maybe they'll find something

So long story show motherboard not dead and I took the computer to a Stables to see if they could do something. They ran some test on the hardware and everything is good. They're theory is that the issue that is causing the restarts is in fact driver related. To find out which driver it is that is causing the restarts would entail an additional few days of work and another $60 so I told em no thanks. My question now is: how can I figure out what driver it is that is causing this problem on my own?

There are no clues, so all you can do is eliminate drivers in the Device Manager and perhaps install old ones from before the crashes begun. Always reboot after uninstalling or installing a driver.

Windows update will automatically try to install some new drivers, so for this kind of troubleshooting you might want to turn that off. To do that in win7, just type "Change device installation settings" in the start menu search box.

A complete reinstall of windows might also fix it, if you haven't tried that yet.

Another thing to consider is firmware updates for your motherboard and some other devices, especially previous-generation SSDs. They often contain fixes for these things, so it's worth checking out.

Motherboard Lifespan?
It is usually infinite - they don't die for no reason.

I don't know what happened to you, but Motherboards last forever, they are not like Hard Disk Drives.