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A good one can last many years. I recently gave away a very old Dell desktop (Pentium II) that was probably 8 years old. Hard drive was replaced, but the system was otherwise original. I was surprised the fans still worked.
Some cheaper ones in recent history have a problem with poor quality capacitors (a required electrical part). They look like small cans with labels on them. They would bulge then leak, causing the motherboard to fail. That is why you will see some motherboard brands specifically talk about using Japanese capacitors (good).
They last until they die, there is no set time and no amount of time you can expect them to last, it's an electronic component, it can fail at any time without warning.
It varies tremendously. I've had mobos fail almost out of the box, and I've got one that has been running Win95 since 1994. Primary issues are overheating, bad caps (as hoffdano mentioned), spikes from peripherals, bios failure, and physical abuse.
It varies tremendously. I've had mobos fail almost out of the box, and I've got one that has been running Win95 since 1994. Primary issues are overheating, bad caps (as hoffdano mentioned), spikes from peripherals, bios failure, and physical abuse.
Ahhh, the good ol' physical abuse, the job I had before this one I did repair, new builds, etc, it also had a retail store. When a customer bought a motherboard/CPU combo we would always offer to install and configure the package for free. The ones who thought they knew what they were doing always declined, many ended up bringing them back because it didn't work once assembled. I would always make a point of removing the CPU cooler (back in the day when AMD still used the socket with the lever, similar to socket 7) in front of the customer, and almost always the cooler was on backwards, thus not contacting the CPU, which promptly over heated and cooked when they fired it up, and they could never understand why they weren't going to get a refund.
One other cause of failures - power faults either from a failed power supply or a power surge.
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