I bought in 2021 the ITX version of these motherboards to put together a HTPC. It features two M2 slots, 4 SATA, WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet. Nothing fancy, but plenty for my needs.

It seemed to work fine and I managed to install everything I wanted at first, but I should have realized sooner that it had something seriously wrong with it.

After some months, the machine would randomly reboot. I thought it was a bad nvme, so I replaced it and the error seemed to be gone. Then, the random reboots started again. No matter which slot I put the nvme, it wouldn’t boot, so I got a NVM to PCI adapter. That was enough to keep it running for another year or so.

About 3 months ago, it started to refuse to boot again. I was so tired of dealing with this crap, I put it aside.

Today I finally got the time to troubleshoot If I removed the NVM disk, I could try to boot it via USB disks. This time, it also stopped recognizing two of the SATA ports. Tried to upgrade the BIOS as I found some reports claiming there was an issue with earlier revisions of it, but the flash utility now itself is failing with “BIOS id check failed”, no matter which version of I try to load.

Needless to say, time has passed so I can not return it anymore. so this is board is just an expensive paper weight. I’m not buying from them again.

I just needed to vent a bit and ask: I have seen faulty boards that have some issue right away, but I never seen an electronic component degrade over time like that. Is that normal?