MSI Reputation/Quality

[Fudd Rucker]

Originally Posted by sswilson

I've had a few decent MSI boards (my first OC kit pusher used to carry them) and am currently running an AM3 board.... never bothered trying to do an RMA. The only thing I'd suggest is to be very careful with bios updates... under no circumstances should you use their live bios update.... they may have improved over time, but in the past it's always been a POS (bricked at least one of my boards).

Yep I dealt with that problem twice back in the day with 2 K7N Delta2 LSR boards. Both times Id use the live update flash my bios got borked and it was like pulling teeth to get MSI to send me new rom chips. Those were the last MSI boards I ever used and I dont think my story has much relevance to the thread.

[Squeetard]

Haven't used msi in years. Had too many problems with their older boards.

[Linus]

Originally Posted by martin_metal_88

Well MSI have really great product. Most of heavy OC'er use them but...when it come to die, then good luck for RMA. Where is linus? He is not here to defend MSI today?

I'm here alright.

Actually I did an RMA with them recently that wasn't a problem at all. Had a motherboard bricked by their BIOS update utility (didn't notice in the change log for the one I was flashing to that it said "fixes BIOS update utility") and I had to send it in for RMA. Took about 2 weeks (fine considering I shipped ground to them) and no complaints.

That said, Gigabyte went the extra mile for me on my most recent RMA, even phoning me to confirm if I was okay with the replacement (my part was EOL).

Bottom line: GREAT product these days, my personal experience has been very positive. Until very recently I would have been the first on the MSI hate-wagon (after that awful K8N2 Platinum or w/e it was... some S754 board with great reviews and tons of issues), but I also recognize when strides are being made to improve product, and I'd gladly recommend their current AMD/P55 boards.

[Fudd Rucker]

Originally Posted by Linus

That said, Gigabyte went the extra mile for me on my most recent RMA, even phoning me to confirm if I was okay with the replacement (my part was EOL).

Ya gigabyte is great for that, I recently RMAd my old 790GP-UD4H board (which i loved dearly lol) and they called me to confirm a newer board for replacement. Only beef with gigabyte RMA is the lack of a facility in Canada and shipping to them can go horridly wrong lol. (My board went to the US, then to Mexico and back to the US.)

With that , gigabyte is my number one choice for my personal builds and customer builds as I havent found that other manufacturers can give you the same feature set and quality for the price that gigabyte offers.

On the hand though, 99% of my experiance has been AMD related until my recent crossing over to intel so I still have a bit to go through before I can definatly say who would be best in my opinion for motherboards.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by sswilson

I've had a few decent MSI boards (my first OC kit pusher used to carry them) and am currently running an AM3 board.... never bothered trying to do an RMA. The only thing I'd suggest is to be very careful with bios updates... under no circumstances should you use their live bios update.... they may have improved over time, but in the past it's always been a POS (bricked at least one of my boards).

Originally Posted by Fudd Rucker

Yep I dealt with that problem twice back in the day with 2 K7N Delta2 LSR boards. Both times Id use the live update flash my bios got borked and it was like pulling teeth to get MSI to send me new rom chips. Those were the last MSI boards I ever used and I dont think my story has much relevance to the thread.

Originally Posted by Linus

I'm here alright.

Actually I did an RMA with them recently that wasn't a problem at all. Had a motherboard bricked by their BIOS update utility (didn't notice in the change log for the one I was flashing to that it said "fixes BIOS update utility") and I had to send it in for RMA. Took about 2 weeks (fine considering I shipped ground to them) and no complaints.

That said, Gigabyte went the extra mile for me on my most recent RMA, even phoning me to confirm if I was okay with the replacement (my part was EOL).

Bottom line: GREAT product these days, my personal experience has been very positive. Until very recently I would have been the first on the MSI hate-wagon (after that awful K8N2 Platinum or w/e it was... some S754 board with great reviews and tons of issues), but I also recognize when strides are being made to improve product, and I'd gladly recommend their current AMD/P55 boards.

That's why I love websites like this one.... it says a lot when 3 members say exactly the same thing about a product/product line.

On the whole, I'm not a big RMA kinda person.... if something is DOA I'll return it, but if it works for 6 months and then quits I generally won't bother.

I've had good luck overclocking AMD chips with MSI boards, and wouldn't hesitate to pick up another one for the AMD platform. OTOH, I'm not as familiar with their intel chipset offerings so I think I'd be more inclined to chose a different manufacturer based solely on previous positive experiences.

Another bonus to MSI used to be the fairly strong modded bios community. I've had a couple of lower end boards with annoying issues (IIRC it was USB related) which were resolved through tweaks by one of the longtime members of their forums.

[Zero82z]

The only MSI boards I would use are their LGA1156 and LGA1366 boards, and their recent AMD boards (K9A2, recent AM2+ boards, anything for AM3). I've heard very good things about their recent products (including some pretty glowing reviews), but before that most of their motherboards were pretty lackluster.

[bushwhacker]

$2200.00 MS 1029 laptop was a piece of cheap crap - that spec'ed out well at the time and looked great! Has been an endless nightmare with RMA, poor functionality of heatsinks and breakage due to cheap components and poor design. K8N Neo2 Platinum that had a cheap NB heatsink/fan with an expensive looking label, 4 RAM slots w. the recommendation to only populate w. 2 RAM sticks due to 'issues' and it has recently puked. No more MSI for me!

[dadzilla]

My p7n worked excellently from the very first boot up no issues and sli works great on it. But it would be a kind of low end board I suppose compared to what most you are running. Not a single problem with MSI - even did the live bios update thing and that worked too. Having paid so little for the board, I wouldn't even bother trying to RMA. I am looking at MSI P55-GD65 ATX LGA1156 P55 DDR3 3PCI-E16 CrossFire SLI 2PCI-E1 PCI-E4 2PCI eSATA GBLAN Motherboard from NCIX as my next project, but: having read so much about intel dirty dealing lately, I may have to go back to AMD. I'm so out of touch with AMD - haven't used one since 754. So what is a good AMD set up for the gamer at say $400 - $500 all in except the GPU and PSU? (just mobo, ram, cooler)?

[Writer]

I'm finding the P55 choices kind of frustrating...right now I'm torn between getting a P55-GD65 or an EVGA P55 FTW.

Gigabyte is the most recommended, but all their P55A boards seem hobbled by the early USB3/SATA3 implementation.

[ayah]

eVGA is terrible bang for the buck. (Especially classified and FTW boards) but their support and product are top-notch.
If money isn't too important, I'd vote for the eVGA FTW.