The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Oman7,
From what I've heard about this MB, MSI didn't exactly do themselves proud with it! Newegg didn't carry it for very long either! I know it's been discontinued! I've never had very much luck with MSI motherboards, in fact I have replaced more failed MSI motherboards than any other brand. Their high dollar boards seem to be pretty good though! As far as I'm concerned, if I buy an inexpensive MB it will be either a BioStar or a GigaByte. Asrocks are fairly good, but they just don't last. I've sold and replaced a number of them that failed in warranty way back before I switched brands. The worst (besides the P5N-E) was ECS! Those fools can't even get their compatibility right. The only one I ever bought said right on the box that it was compatible with the Prescot! It wasn't! Frys (another sad story) didn't want to take it back either, until I pressured ECS to lean on Frys! I finally got my money back! LOL!!

Russ

 

ECS are damn awful but I've bought a few MSI cheap boards over the years to replace in peoples' systems, and I know many people that did the same and not one has had any problems. The only MSI board I've replaced full stop is a 5 year old Socket 478 board from an HP. If you need nothing from a board other than for it to work for a simple user, they're dirt cheap and reliable. ASRocks in my experience tend not to be as good and ECS and Asus at the cheap end are absolutely dire.

 

Thanks guys for your opinions.

I had a feeling about this particular model. Not many people bought it, and I didn't like a lot of the reviews I read. Your right about that russ. They didn't have the board long, did they LOL! I wonder if they were aware of some kind of faulty Southbridge issue. Ive been hearing that a lot more as of late. Southbridge, Southbridge, Southbridge, etc. Wonderful. He's gonna love this. I wonder if MSI is gonna work with me on this. Cause neither I or my brother wanna go with the same model, after all the crap its put us through. Im tempted to give him my older Msi board, and purchase another for myself, or at least to get him by for a while. I do like MY msi board LOL!

 

Sam,
All the MSIs I did replace were socket A. ECS at any end are junk, IMO! They should fly up their own cheap end, and disappear! LOL!!

Russ

 

Nothing went wrong with my MSI Socket A board...

 

Ok, now lets be silly for a moment LOL! Ok, the Northbridge is the Shiny heatsink in the center with the MSI logo. But is the indicated chip the southbridge? Is it possible the board doesn't have a southbridge in the conventional sense?

 

No that's probably an audio chip. That's a single chipset board, the NB and SB are integrated.

 

so your saying, they're rolled into one bridge? Huh. Has this kind of implementation been used for a while. Or was it cutting edge with this board, and thats a possibility why its screwed up LOL!

 

Sam,
Yes, but that's just one board. When I first moved here, all most people owned around were AMDs socket A's, mostly MSI and ECS! It was really rare to come across and Intel. Same way with socket 939. The first one I ever saw was the BioStar for the 4000+ I put together for my friend Russell. I've also only come across 1 Socket 754 in the past 6 years.

Russ

 

the same russel with the talking dog hehe

 

Omega, it was used with lots of things, one of which was the nforce 4, which was actually a reasonably solid chipset. Much better than the <expletive> nvidia put out as chipsets these days.
Russ: It was just one board for me, but I know loads of people who had similar boards, none had trouble with the MSI ones, the only ones that went wrong were ECS, Asus and Biostar. I think it's fair to say Biostar were a bit different back then to what they are now.

 

Meh. I think I just got a bad egg. My other MSI with an Nvidia chipset is good. VERY good in fact. While my quad core gigabyte can encode like a mad machine, the dual core MSI just feels more streamlined. Not that that has anything to do with the chipset. Guess you win some, and you lose some.

I finally got over to his house. The clone job went well. I now will endorse, "Easeus Disk Copy" It booted up the cloned drive, like nothing ever happened. A bit for bit copy. VERY nice! As I figured, the bottleneck remains. Whatever causes it to not post at times, and bottleneck windows, remains.

 

Well...isn't that lovely. I buy the WD1001FALS and now its down 10 more dollars LOL! That is my luck I suppose. Thats with a Promo Code by the way.

 

Just the way it goes. You should feel lucky, $10 isn't a lot to lose like that.

 

I was more or less sharing the Sale going on at newegg VERY good buy on a VERY good drive. I bought the first one when it was over 200$

 

That be the one! LOL!! I admit I had a hard time believing it myself! When I first moved here I used to hear someone talking at night when I was in bed. because of the design and construction of both houses (they are mirror images of each other) sound bounces all over the place, so it's sometimes difficult to know where it's coming from. After a couple of months of hearing "voices", I finally told Russell about it, and he laughed and explained about the dog. I don't think I believed it right away, but one day I was in the kitchen and had brought some donuts home. I was standing there eating one, and I heard clear as a bell, "gimmee the damn donut"! Since only me and the dog were home, I had to conclude that it was no tall tale! Overall over the next couple of years, I figured that Shilo had about a 60-70 word vocabulary and could put them in context! once she saved a bunch of homeless people who had moved into an apartment building that had been condemned, right behind where we live. Russell went into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, and he kept hearing "Hey you in the house, come here" when he went to the back door to see what the dog was on about, he saw the blaze and called 911! A year or so later, it was confirmed by the Police officer that came to ask Russell about the fire. I met him by chance because I had called 911 when high voltage wires had come down in a wind storm right at my corner. When I told him where I lived the first thing he asked me was about the talking dog! I played dumb and said yeah right! He told me it was no joke, as he had petted the dog and Shilo told hom plain as day, "Thank you"! I swear to god, it's not a tall tale, it's true!

Russ

 

Sam,
I did see problems with early Biostars, but they've greatly improved. I only replaced a couple of MSIs that I had installed new, but I saw a lot of older ones that had gone south! In fact, I started replacing them with the 9300-M9 at the time and switched to GigaBytes shortly after that!

Russ

 

Well...I possibly found one. A utility to find motherboard errors. Whether it finds Northbridge/Southbridge errors...I do not know. Any thoughts on this little program fellas? Should I shrug it off like a bad shirt LOL!

http://www.allworldsoft.com/software/12-870-hot-cpu-tester-pro.htm

 

Oman7,
I don't know! I wouldn't because I've found that heat is not always the answer, and I question what 6 hours of it would do to things. I'm not in favor of heat for heat's sake! There's a lot more to problems than heat! Are these Sata or IDE drives you have on this computer. If Sata, I would try a new cable first!

I just had a problem with my top burner. The bottom one would burn all right but the top wouldn't write the lead-out! A young friend was over here the other day downloading some games, and he mentioned something about the burner, but he said he fixed it, so I called him up and asked him what he did. He had changed some of the settings in properties for the drive. I went and set them back to defaults, and it burns fine now! Why people with less experience than you see fit to make changes in your computer is beyond me! LOL!! I would at least ask first! I guess there's a difference in the generation gap! ROFLMSOAO!! Good kid though! His father is one of my best friends! The first time I ever saw him doing anything with a computer was about 6 years ago. He was going to "borrow" his Dad's good video card. I told him to turn it off first, but he wouldn't listed. Said he did it all the time! LOL!! Can you say smoke! ROFL!! I thought his Dad was going to kill him!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

looking at new ram. 2x2gb sticks. these arent the beloved dominator series, not even a corsair set in the list. good ram is getting pretty cheap even for 4gb. is there a real advantage to haveing a heat spreader as to not have one? other than for protection of the chips on the sticks????i know sounds stupid but thats how it truely looks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...227420&page=3&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True