SlackROG wrote:
I was thinking about the TUF, and to be honest, so far the B250F is running great, I've only been seeing BIOS issues in the UI...

But the clock was just off 2 mins, when I started up the box for the day, with a new battery in it I just bought, which then had me wondering, what the heck is going on now...

So I've been thinking MAXIMUS VIII HERO, also hopefully for the idea too, that installing Win7 on this thing is easier then the B250F which is a pain in the butt...

The hero is a good board and a very popular board.

FYI Installing win7 on anything that came out after Win 8 and especially win 10 is a PITA as the drivers were not made for Win 7. There are some references in the forum from folks who have done it. Some boards support pages have a reference for it.

Cost very much reflects you get what you pay for. I dont think Ive spent under $350 for several builds. Most recent $649
CPU and graphics are important but a good MOBO and PSU are equally important.

Korth wrote:
M8H is a fine choice for your SKL processor and Win7.

Win7 doesn't support KBL so it won't work on your B250F. It can be made to work on KBL but in ways which are hacky and finicky and troublesome now and which can only get worse in the future.

The better choice is to retire your Win7 (and skip past Win8/8.1 because it'll be EOL soon, too). Your choices boil down to Win10 or a linux on newer hardware ... or Win7 on older hardware ... or Win7 on newer hardware with an endless pile of increasingly technical issues/workarounds.

Korth, I want to learn some linux and was thinking of using an old ASUS P6T with i7-960, just for learning. Why do you say that "Your choices boil down to ...Linux on newer hardware"? Are there just too many problems running Linux on older hardware to make it worthwhile? You might be giving me an excuse to build something new.
Thanks!

R5Eandme wrote:
Korth, I want to learn some linux and was thinking of using an old ASUS P6T with i7-960, just for learning. Why do you say that "Your choices boil down to ...Linux on newer hardware"? Are there just too many problems running Linux on older hardware to make it worthwhile? You might be giving me an excuse to build something new.
Thanks!

Full time Debian GNU/Linux user here.

First, as you might be aware Linux is just a kernel. It's paired with other software and presented as a distribution. Debian for example, is a distribution of software that ships with the Linux kernel. It will happily install on some very old hardware - I think his post was referring to the fact that as Windows 7 is being left behind, your choices with new hardware are either Windows 10 or a Linux distribution.

The ASUS P6T / i7-960 will work flawlessly under all major distributions.

If this will be your first entry into using Linux of any kind, I would suggest Linux Mint. It is based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian...), but easier to get going for new users. If you want to dive right in, Debian itself is significantly faster than both Mint or Ubuntu in my experience, and as it doesn't ship with anything, you only install what you want. The only way to gain more fine grained control would be with Arch or Gentoo or something, and that's too much effort for me 😛

R5Eandme wrote:
Why do you say that "Your choices boil down to ...Linux on newer hardware"? Are there just too many problems running Linux on older hardware to make it worthwhile?

linux works fine on older hardware, better than Windows in many instances, not quite as good in others.
linux works fine on newer hardware, though it's sometimes a little behind and needs to "catch up" on the latest-and-greatest of the new tech.
What I was saying is that different Windows versions, not linux versions, have compatibility issues on older/newer hardware.

The big sticking point is DirectX, it's basically owned by Microsoft and is exclusive to Windows, linux can "fully" emulate Windows and the DirectX within it but the end result doesn't give the performance advantage DirectX is meant to deliver. OGL works perfectly in linux but it's a terrible game API begin with. Vulkan works perfectly in linux and it's emerging impressively, although it's still not widely adopted by the game devs. What this means in practice is fewer AAA game titles which can run perfectly (though most can still run pretty well) outside Win10/DX12 for the next year or three.

You can run linux on any hardware, even on many platforms Windows does not support, there's no need to select specific older/newer hardware to build into a linux system. You can even run linux from "Live USB" or "Live CD/DVD" without doing a proper install onto fixed drive, without even touching the install WinOS partitions or data. Mint is a popular choice for linux beginners and Windows refugees. Learning the GUI and features and workings of a linux is about as complicated as learning the GUI and features and workings of a new WinOS or a new smartphone.

Thank you for your advice Seda and Korth. This is great. I will use my old hardware for starters and if I want to go further maybe buy some new hardware that has become older and thus the Linux distro will likely have good drivers. A portable distro is an option for my Win10 machine, but I also have this old machine asking me for a new life. I have read about Ubuntu, Mint and fedora, but have not decided among them. Ubuntu and fedora seem to have more institutional support than Mint, and Mint had that malware episode last year. But Mint is supposed to be good for multimedia applications. The Linux world is certainly confusing. And it amazes me that there are enough programmers to donate their time to support so many distributions. It's great, if a bit fractured. What do you think of Ubuntu and fedora?

R5Eandme wrote:
Korth, I want to learn some linux and was thinking of using an old ASUS P6T with i7-960, just for learning. Why do you say that "Your choices boil down to ...Linux on newer hardware"? Are there just too many problems running Linux on older hardware to make it worthwhile? You might be giving me an excuse to build something new.
Thanks!

The post was actually about best Track Record for a motherboard I was looking to purchase please don't hijack posts and keep them on topic.

You should of created a new post over Linux motherboard support...

And no Linux does not work best with new as in the latest hardware, Linux works best typically on hardware that has been around for anywhere from 6 months to a year.

I guess you could say that time frame is new or fairly new, but anything beyond a year you don't need to bother with.

Bleeding edge new is what I am talking about Ryzen when it first came out, if you jumped on it, would not be a good idea....

With Linux, at least wait 6 months, or possibly a little longer depending on what it is...

I have seen them still working out a Ryzen CPU bug in Linux 6-7 months later...