Current Buyer's Guide Motherboards Discontinued?

[fjnorb]

Hello. With help from TonyMac and the forums I was able to build a great, rock-solid Haswell Hack off the March 2014 Buyer's Guide, and it has been one of my favorite and most-reliable systems ever since, and certainly the best non-Apple computer I've ever owned. But it's been four years and it's time to replace it.

I am looking at the mATX boards on the Buyer's Guide, of which there are two - the Gigabyte GA-Z270MX-Gaming 5 and the ASUS ROG STRIX G270G Gaming. Since I don't need to waste the space of a full or mid-tower ATX case, and I'll only ever have a GPU and an SSD in it, I wanted to go with an mATX board to get into the smaller cases.

But the only two mATX boards in the Buyer's Guide are essentially discontinued. Amazon shows it as "only available from other sellers," where I'd rather it be fulfilled by Amazon, and NewEgg says "We don't have this product and may not carry it again."

I'm not criticizing, just curious - why is this? Is it because the testing takes so long that a board has reached its end-of-life? Or only poor-selling motherboards are really compatible with MacOS? Or something else? Most importantly, what would you do if you were in my situation?

Again, just want to understand, this is in no way a criticism. TonyMac and this community have made Hackintoshing easy and reliable for me, and I'd like to do my part by using the affiliate links. But buying essentially second-hand on Amazon as my only choice makes me a little uncomfortable, and of course if I had the money to take chances on third-party sellers, I'd just buy an actual Mac.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

 

[trs96]

Have a look at the Coffee Lake mATX motherboards. Note that you must use an 8 series CPU and not a 7 series Kaby Lake CPU.
They are not in the Buyer's Guide but will still work like most other Z370 motherboards will.

Choose from the Asus, Gigabyte and Asrock models on Newegg.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007627%20601304476%20600009017

 

[fjnorb]

Have a look at the Coffee Lake mATX motherboards. Note that you must use an 8 series CPU and not a 7 series Kaby Lake CPU.
They are not in the Buyer's Guide but will still work like most other Z370 motherboards will.

Choose from the Asus, Gigabyte and Asrock models on Newegg.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007627%20601304476%20600009017

Thanks, but the link goes to a page that says "We have found 0 items that match."

 

[trs96]

Thanks, but the link goes to a page that says "We have found 0 items that match."

Try this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...145055&cm_re=z370_matx-_-13-145-055-_-Product

 

[fjnorb]

Try this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...145055&cm_re=z370_matx-_-13-145-055-_-Product

Thanks, I'll look at it.

My original question remains, though.

 

[trs96]

Coffee Lake hardware is supported by High Sierra currently even though there are no Macs for sale that use the Z370/H370 chipset. Once there are some of those for retail sale then the guide will be updated to make those the primary recommendation.
I'd guess that there will be an iMac refresh this year that uses the i5-8400 and the i7-8700(K) so it won't be too long. The Buyer's Guide is not law written in stone, you can go outside of that if you do the research first. It's a basic guideline to begin from.

 

[fjnorb]

Coffee Lake hardware is supported by High Sierra currently even though there are no Macs for sale that use the Z370/H370 chipset. Once there are some of those for retail sale then the guide will be updated to make those the primary recommendation.
I'd guess that there will be an iMac refresh this year that uses the i5-8400 and the i7-8700(K) so it won't be too long. The Buyer's Guide is not law written in stone, you can go outside of that if you do the research first. It's a basic guideline to begin from.

The original question was, why does the current month's Buyer's Guide, law written in stone or not, link to discontinued hardware?

 

[trs96]

The original question was, why does the current month's Buyer's Guide, law written in stone or not, link to discontinued hardware?

You'd need to ask @adamsmasher who maintains and updates that. I'd guess that if they are removed people that still want to buy them used/refurb or from other sites would not have the list to choose from if they had been removed from the Guide when out of stock.