http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...er=BESTMATCH&Description=Gigabyte+P55&x=0&y=0 http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=MSI+P55&x=0&y=0
Then I'd recommend you don't. If there are limited options available at local stores, you will be compromising the quality of your PC.
I personally use a MSI P55-GD65, but if you dont need a second PCIe 2.0 x16 slot then you can save about $20. The GD65 has tons of customizing options for OCing, and even a nice built in auto OC sytem. You can get better results from a manual OC but for an auto OC it may be one of the best on the market. Even if your not into OCing, it gives you crossfire/sli compatibility should you consider this in the future.
Buy online...local stores tent to charge a lot more for the same parts, and have terrible selection. Overall, I think gigabyte makes the best mainboard at the moment. DFI is close, but they are too concerned with tweeking to worry about the finer details. Evga seems to have good build quality, and some of their boards are VERY impressive...but the prices are insane for these boards, and they offer very little advantage over a gigabyte board that costs half as much. Also, they seem to try to hide the limitations of their products from the customers; many of the claims they make on their high-end "classified" series are impossible...and they don't even offer online manuals for those looking to find out what they would actualy get by buying one of these boards. Asus has poor quality, and prices similar to Gigabyte and DFI. Ignoring the quality, the boards still tend to lack the features in a similarly prices Gigabyte/DFI. MSI is a bit hit-n-miss...some of their boards are as solid as a gigabyte...others are not as good. Overall, qualit is decent, and much better today than it used to be. They are also guilty of some false (or at least intentionaly misleading) advertising, for instance, the P55-GD80 is advertised as having 3 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots...in reality, it has one gen2 x16 slot, one x8 slot, and one x4 slot. At least MSI makes such information available to those who dig; unline evga.
I have bought every component of every system I have built for the past five years from on-line retailers. 90% from newegg and the rest from a few specialty shops. Newegg has excellent customer service and return policies. I have no idea what the impact would be of shipping and sales tax in Canada, but in the USA newegg is a reliable source of build components. Dick
+1 What specialty stores have you utilized? I recently utilized frozencpu.com. Long story short, ordered a heat sink. Got it, the packages for the brackets were open. Emailed FrozenCPU. No answer. Left feedback on reseller rating stating I wasnt thrilled. With in about 2-3 hours FrozenCPU called me and addressed the concerns. Not just a email, a phone call. They offered me $5 off my next order(on top of the 10% of for leaving feedback) just for changing up my review. They apologized and said the email must have slipped through the cracks. performance-pcs.com on the other hand, I was completley unhappy with. They seemed a bit rude in there email if I recall. Might sound silly, but my problem was the SATA cables i ordered looked NOTHING like the ones on there site.
this looks to be a nice system your doing here. the only things i would change is the MOBO. as sam stated. knowing from experence from just doing this same type build the BioStar TPower I55 is a awsome board with the I5 750 i would try and get the DDR3 2000 mem for better OC'ing. I/We have our setup now runnning at 4.25ghz prime95 and IBT stable prime has been running almost 22hrs now. also as sam stated stay way from the seagate drives right now they are shakey as can be.. i just RMA'd 1 waiting for a return in the mean time i went and bought another 500gb seagate cause it was so cheap(you get what you pay for) it was DOA. took it back and waiting on RMA.
According to which authority? I've owned a lot of motherboards including Asus and I mean a lot in numbers I can no longer remember, and I've never sent an Asus board back. In fact they've all worked until I either archived them, sold them, or gave them away. I've also had quite a few Gigabyte boards and I have sent one of those back and have another I have yet to toss (Socket A series). No electronics manufacturer including computer parts are ever going to hit 100% working order status. There are some that have a history of failure and are to be avoided, but Asus boards are not among them. xEzekialx When you ask for opinions unfortunately that's usually what you'll get. Next time save yourself some misery and ask for information instead, and then do a little research to verify it. You just might find out the difference between information and opinions.
According to, now, almost everyone I know except for you and three or four others. My 4/4 failure rate with them wouldn't really be enough to steer everyone away from them, but the miriad of failures from all of my friends is. The only people who still think Asus are anything but bottom of the barrel quality are those who have been very fortunate indeed.
According to quite a few people here. I just had an ASUS die on me about a month ago. P5N-D to be exact. ASUS used to make good mobos, but the past few years, im told there quality has been lacking. I some what disagree about opinions. Opinions are good, but you should do the research on the products mentioned.
In Asus' defense, the P5N-D uses a ghastly nforce 7 series chipset. However, they can't be excused for failed boards left right and centre using AMD and Intel chipsets, since few other manufacturers have any difficult getting boards to last more than 18 months.
The same two as you: predominantly Performance-PC and a few from FrozenCPU. Fortunately, I haven't had any issues with either of them. Dick
You and your friends experience with Asus is solely based on your experiences, and that amounts to minor anecdotal info at best; or in the scheme of things absolutely nothing. My experience with two bad Gigabyte boards would in no way impair my judgment of Gigabyte boards to a point where I would no longer recommend them. In fact I consider Gigabyte among my choices whenever I decide to do a new build. Putting a product down based on limit experience with it is not only disingenuous it's downright dishonest. Now if a particular model of a board begins to show issues then tell it all but a particular model is not representative a line. In my view the vast majority of board faults are from user screw-ups resulting from inexperience. KillerBug Take what you read here with a grain of salt and then look for a broader sampling from other sources. Pick out a few boards of interest and then Google them to see what's been written about them by experts.
Reading as-new reports of boards is meaningless. Asus' rate of DOAs is relatively low, I know of few people to have received DOA boards. However, the way Asus boards are manufactured appears to be flawed, loads of them produce the same electrical faults after between 4 and 20 months of use. If 4 or 5 boards all exhibited the same flaw, fair enough, could be very bad luck. 20+ of them? No, I refuse to believe that's bad luck. To argue that such a test is meaningless would demean all of statistics. Granted, not all Asus boards exhibit these issues, but it is common. With so many viable alternatives, that should be more than enough.
I never recommended checking "as-new reports" but listening to the advice given on this thread is taking the advice of a few moderately experienced individuals with a very narrow and limited perspective. All pure conjecture on your part that is not evidenced or reported by computer technologists. Outside of reported hearsay where is your evidence to support your claims? Enough Hearsay, link me to the reports. I can makeup numbers regarding just about any statistic but without proof it's all arbitrary. It's OK to recommend a product that you're happy with and even to relate information about one that you're not happy with, but to throw a negative net over an entire product line based on limited experienced is prevarication. If our OP is just looking for forum opinions then here is a current image from an ongoing motherboard poll at Tomshardware forum.
Biostar, arguably one of the best MB out there, didn't get even one vote. Does that mean it is worthless trash or that the people participating in the poll are clueless? There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Dick
Dear lord, there are so very many things wrong with that chart it makes me want to cry. A total of only 158 votes? 6 of whom voted for a company that's been out of business for months. It's also from Toms Hardware, which has been a steadily declining website to the point I no longer even consider articles written on it. Ultimately, there will always be those people who are so focused on their passion for their favourite brand that they will always defend it in the face of adversity. There are many people like that out there, no brand moreso in the motherboard industry than Asus and Gigabyte. I am not one of those people, I have openly criticised all the brands of board I've used on several occasions, as I am not truly happy with any of them. However, of the ones I've used, I would always place Asus at the bottom. Knowing that only 10-20% of my friends' Asus boards still work is enough to convince anyone, or at least make them think twice about buying from a company like Asus. You are never going to find hard facts unless you get all your friends to sign up to the forum and post their own info, spamming the thread to bits. A clever little way for the brand fanatics out there to poke holes in the 'opposition'. The only hard evidence you really have of genuine long-term reliability of products is not newegg reviews (where let's face it, there are a lot of idiots), not tech websites, but the experience of real people, especially if you've been there to confirm the diagnosis, and trust them not to do anything stupid, as I do. You can dig out arbitrary returns figures to stores, but given the attitudes of many people (for instance, the 'give up, it's not worth it' attitude I have employed 3 out of 4 times with Asus boards and on several occasions with other products, or the 'ebay as faulty' method many employ, or those who try and tinker with stuff to fix it themselves [and inevitably make it worse]) that really isn't at all representative. It is also biased with those people who only thought their board was broken. Frankly, if you know them well, the experience of real world individuals is as good as it will get. Collectively my friend own/have owned maybe 30 or so Asus boards, 20 or so Gigabytes, a large group MSIs, a good few DFIs, a couple of Biostars, an EVGA or two, and a few ECSs. Of these, most of the Asuses are long dead and buried, and in a few cases, their replacements also dead (in two cases four times over). All but one of the Gigabytes still work (some after 4+ years), not one of the MSIs, DFIs or Biostars has failed (other than one of the DFIs being destroyed by a watercooling accident) one of the EVGAs and all of the ECSs are dead. That should explain why it's Gigabyte, Biostar or MSI for me. Usually if someone has had bad experiences with one or two, the other is always an option open to them, without them having to risk the pit of woe, return postage and phone calls that is Asus, ASRock or ECS. k7: Glad to know you spotted that too. There are plenty of enthusiasts out there thrilled with their Biostars. They pull off amazing overclocks, seem to last very well, and are reasonably priced. A win in my book.
Dear Lord you missed the entire point of posting the poll. The least of those people who contributed to it have as much experience with building as anyone in this thread and many of them a lot more. I posted it to make a direct comparison to the limited advice flowing out of this thread. You've probably used less than ten boards of all the boards you've used so how does that rise to the level of fact? Trust me! When a product line starts to go south technologists from sites such as Anandtech, HardOCP, ARS Technica, The Tech Report, and others will be all over it. Those are sites that produce "hard facts." All anecdotal evidence from you and your friends produce is a continuous line of conjecture pointing the finger away from yourselves. It only gets as good as the experience levels of the individuals disseminating the information real world or not. I hope the OP has reviewed all of this and learned to spend a little more time sampling a broader range of opinions. If that's happened then something good will come of this. Goodnight!
I like how every post of yours basically tries to divert the blame away from Asus and "oh, it must be that they broke the board or don't know how to use it". A sign of a flaw in the argument perhaps? Websites like those listed don't pick up on long-term reliability very much at all, else every ECS motherboard review would be filled with comments about how they're ghastly. Very few reviews are, yet you'll find almost nobody who disagrees that the quality of ECS stuff is garbage. When a particular product has a serious defect, it's all over the news - the Corsair Dominator GT with Elpida modules is a recent example. When a company as a whole has mediocre build quality, it slips through the net, despite how many people believe it to be the case.
