It seems backwards but late revision high end gaming boards have economies of scale that force the manufacturers into making stable boards to reduce RMA volume. The boards also tend to be cheaper too due the same economies of scale.

The VRM and other power delivery circuits on overclocking boards are also typically engineered to handle much higher voltages than spec.

Avoid the first revision though, which is probably good advice for any device.

Do the gaming boards support ECC memory however? That's usually the one major difference between a high performance gaming board and a basic workstation board. Sometimes they'll even have a chipset that has ECC support, but the BIOS will disable it because they hate you.

That's the big question. It seems like many AMD AM4 socket boards claim to support it. Few Intel boards do, unless you go with a Xeon socket. You can never really tell if they've done it properly until you get one on the bench and decode its DMI tables.

Although they certain have boards with flashy lights, Gigabyte has been my mainstay for stable boards, and they do advertise signal integrity and thermal safety. (They also have a Black Edition of many of their boards, which has extra testing)

Side note, for more capable boards with the features I need I've noticed it actually costs more to get one without built-in RGB. Not sure how that became the premium option now.

The lights are just personally offensive to me. I'm happy to pay more for their non-existence.

Guessing because desoldering is so time-consuming.

I've always had really good results (performance and longevity) with Asus gaming boards despite them having all the LED "features." I just turn all that junk off in the bios.

Be careful with Asus motherboards: it seems that Z390 boards will push some Asus software to Windows installations just by booting it unless you disable it properly in the BIOS.

As a consequence, you probably want to disable the BIOS option before booting any Windows installation (in my case, it was called "Q-installer", but it is different for gaming boards in my understanding). Until you disable it, it will reinstall and re-enable itself at boot.

See: https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-au...

In my case, I noticed it thanks to Windows Server pointing out which service was slowing down shutdown, which was "AsusUpdateCheck". Increased the shutdown time by a few seconds.

I did not find any info about how to make Windows ignore the WPBT table.

Anecdotal, but my Asus Z170i from 2015 has been solid for 4 years. Doesn't have any lights, maybe there wasn't room for them in the miniITX form factor.

EDIT - had the date wrong, it was mid-2016.

Also anecdotal:

My desktop is still running smoothly on its Asus mobo from 2014 (I believe it was the Z97-P but I'm not home at the moment to double check). No fancy RGB LEDs, but I haven't shopped for one in a while so that may be harder to accomplish now. Not sure.

Either way, they've always been competitively priced and well supported. Used them to build both gaming and general use machines for friends/family over the past several years without issue.

Supermicro for fully fledged workstation experience

ASUS as a good "home" option

In reality I would suggest investing in HP Z series workstations or Z series small formfactor machines. They rock!

When I started building my own machines I originally went the inexpensive route with AMD CPUs and (I forget the brand) boards, but after three motherboard failures in 18 months I switched to Intel CPUs and Intel boards and never had a problem again. I haven't built a machine in years (I buy laptops, Mac minis, and Intel NUCs for my computing needs) and while it's a little sad that Intel is out of this game now if I was going to build out a Windows/Linux/*BSD non-laptop system it would likely be a NUC anyway so, in a way, I don't feel like I would be missing anything.

FYI, For the past year and a half (since the 2000 series Ryzen CPUs) the upper-mid range motherboards have MUCH better designs in terms of power and thermal management than a few years ago. With Ryzen's relative popularity with the home/enthusiast builders, it's become worth it for mfgs to prioritize those efforts more.

You should have a better experience today. Though, I would wait 2-3 months after a product (mb/cpu) launch before getting one in general. Just so BIOS updates can shake out a bit and software support (Windows/Linux) can as well.