Motherboard Industrial grade motherboards

[JS428]

Hello All,

I am new to this forum and very novice in pc builds. I joined as I am interested in building a SFF with an industrial grade motherboard (and its recommended psu). I realize that industrial grade motherboards have a specific purpose in that they are suited to a defined physical environment, but my reason for using one for a home/office build is that my PC will last longer. I am interested in long-term reliability. Does anyone know if industrial motherboards last significantly longer than ordinary consumer-line motherboards? Is this difference in reliability (i.e. lasting longer) well proven?

 

[tinyitx]

When you said 'long-term', roughly how long do you have in mind? 5, 7 or 10 years?

 

[JS428]

Within that range, let's say 5-8 years ...

 

[Phuncz]

In server and embedded applications, the real stuff mind you, the boards do last longer. They're still going to need replacing sooner or later with a chance of early failure, but until now I've not had to replace many motherboards from dozens of servers ranging up to 20 years old.

 

[JS428]

In server and embedded applications, the real stuff mind you, the boards do last longer. They're still going to need replacing sooner or later with a chance of early failure, but until now I've not had to replace many motherboards from dozens of servers ranging up to 20 years old.

O.K this is helpful. Industrial Motherboards, I understand, can be in use on a 15 hrs or even 24/7 basis so building on that I'm assuming since a home office/pc is to the max getting 15 hrs continuous use (in may case) then the motherboard can indeed last a long time. I've had consumer-type computers (i.e motherboards) last long too, I have a Lenovo 3000 c200 from early 2007 still going on strong despite daily heavy use (have changed keyboard only due to one or two keys not working and have changed HD as a means of preventative maintenance.

I suppose buying one of those decent industrial motherboards could be a problem if I can't find re-sellers, and I'm not based in the US or Europe so that makes it harder.

 

[AlexTSG]

The company I work for uses industrial motherboards in our devices, and we have thousands of them in the field.

We install them into cash handling devices which often include many attached devices including scanners, fingerprint readers, printers, and various sensors.

The reason me use them over "normal" motherboards, is not for their longevity, but rather because they support a wide voltage range which lets us run them from the power supply that powers the rest of the device. They also have support for the many USB and serial (RS232) ports that we require for attaching everything.

Although we have some that have been in service for many many years, I wouldn't buy one specifically for that reason. Also, the one's we normally used are passively cooled and don't support the latest and greatest processors (most of ours are Pentium based), which is fine, as we don't really need that much processing power.

We have many server boards, and desktop boards that have lasted just as long or longer than the industrial boards. (10 years+)

 

[JS428]

The company I work for uses industrial motherboards in our devices, and we have thousands of them in the field.

We install them into cash handling devices which often include many attached devices including scanners, fingerprint readers, printers, and various sensors.

The reason me use them over "normal" motherboards, is not for their longevity, but rather because they support a wide voltage range which lets us run them from the power supply that powers the rest of the device. They also have support for the many USB and serial (RS232) ports that we require for attaching everything.

Although we have some that have been in service for many many years, I wouldn't buy one specifically for that reason. Also, the one's we normally used are passively cooled and don't support the latest and greatest processors (most of ours are Pentium based), which is fine, as we don't really need that much processing power.

We have many server boards, and desktop boards that have lasted just as long or longer than the industrial boards. (10 years+)

I understand the limitations you mentioned having read around the subject-matter. Your last point, which is what I'm concerned about, seems to suggest that there might not be any substantive quality difference between components in industrial boards and normal (the high-end) ones. Anyway, interesting perspective from the field. I can't find more info on this matter; longevity isn't really directly discussed in many of tech/specs sheets I've seen.

 

[AlexTSG]

I understand the limitations you mentioned having read around the subject-matter. Your last point, which is what I'm concerned about, seems to suggest that there might not be any substantive quality difference between components in industrial boards and normal (the high-end) ones. Anyway, interesting perspective from the field. I can't find more info on this matter; longevity isn't really directly discussed in many of tech/specs sheets I've seen.

Despite extensive use of industrial boards at work (and the fact that I can buy them at cost), I've still chosen to get a high end B550 motherboard for a PC that I'm building for myself in the next few weeks (MSI), and for a colleague (Gigabyte), who I'm building a PC for right now.

I think buying higher end components is likely to result in a PC which will last at least as long as it's still useful.

We're already recycling PCs and servers at the office (mostly 10+ years old), which are still working, but are no longer able to run the applications we use, and aren't very energy efficient. To me if a PC can last that long, it's long enough.