The truth is most independent hardware vendors can beat Intel in customer service. Intel still takes the lead in sheer technological achievement and development, but the flip side of that is the arrogance that comes from being the dominant player in the computer industry. I switched to using Gigabyte motherboards a couple of years ago and haven’t yet regretted it. There are numbers of independent hardware vendors that have taken Intel’s chips and made a much better job of producing something that works than the chipmaker itself. Over and over we have seen sagas over bad drivers and inbuilt obsolescence. Intel really got my goat when Windows Vista came out and they pressured Microsoft to certify the D915 and related chipsets as “Vista Ready” when they could not work under the Aero display model that was a core feature of the new OS graphics architecture. Then when I got into small form factor boards more recently, the Intel Atom D2700 offerings turned out to be very lacking in video drivers and could not meet up to the claims made of them. Further sagas have followed with onboard USB3 drivers and now the graphics drivers for the H97 motherboard in my main PC.
So this week I put a graphics card into my Gigabyte H97-D3H system. I have a couple of these NV210SL-1G1 cards in different computers and while the performance for gaming would be pretty light, it is just what is needed for the kind of stuff I do; more importantly, NVidia is much better at this job than Intel. After months of display driver problems it is really refreshing to have everything working properly again. If you followed my saga on my FB page, this was the card that the system wouldn’t boot up seemingly when I first built it. Just as with the DB75EN that wouldn’t boot my new quad head NVidia card, I put in the latest BIOS update for the motherboard and everything has come up brilliantly. Even though the Intel onboard chipset can handle three outputs compared to the NVidia card’s two, the latter is much more reliable overall, and this computer only has two displays.