Motherboard Options

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mtslegacy

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Does anyone know how MSI compares to Abit, Asus, Gigabyte or the other boards fro the lga775 socket? I was about to go Asus or Gigabyte but became intrigued by the MSI boards during my research.
 
Well it seems alot of people here like MSI, I hate them and I think they are crappy and cheap. But if you want a budget mb go with MSI, but expect problems, especially with power distributions. I bought two of them for my old computer and both times that is what was wrong with them. The comp kept restarting itself, I replaced the mb with an Asus and never had that problem again, so I will stick with Asus.

Additionaly, I would go with at least an AMD Athlon 64 because it will prepare you for the 64-bit software and hardware coming down the line, plus AMD is around 15-20% cheaper than Intel.

Here's a tip. If something is cheap, there is a reason for that. You get what you pay for most of the time.

If you choose to go with Asus and an Athlon 64, Asus has a new mb out that uses heat pipe technology instead of fans to dissipate heat. Check it out here, although it is a little pricy. But there is a little bit cheaper version with the same technology here.

I buy the majority of my parts from ZipZoomFly.com, they have free 2nd Day Air on most products and they usually keep things in stock.
 
These opinions are valid, but contradictory to popular opinion on these forums. I highly reguard MSI as a quailty motherboard manufacturer. They are almost always reliable. No company is perfect, and you unfortunately probably got really crappy odds against you.

Asus boards lately have been buggy and not 'sucking down' the Athlon processors the way they should. Asus has contracts with Pentium, if you know what I mean.

DFI is the leader of popularity here on TF. They have awesome quality parts and features. The three boards, in this order, I'd recommend.

DFI
MSI
Gigabyte

Ryan
 
Asus is still the board of choice on the Intel side. That being said, MSI is a good brand and should be fine. Abit is also a solid choice for an Intel board.
 
I'm not disputing any claims towards DFI, however I have an A8N-SLI Premium with an Athlon 64, and I have not problems with the processor "not sucking" down?

I've done quit a bit of research on this, and Asus seems to have the best motherboard out right now as far as SLI goes.

The Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe and the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR both have SLI Support. However the Asus model utilizes x16 on both slots, whereas the DFI model splits the x16 into x8 on each slot. This Asus model is the only one I know of that supports true x16 on both slots.

Additionaly, this Asus model seems to outperform DFI and MSI in 3DMark 05 Benchmark tests, even with two Nvidia 7800 GTX cards in the tests I have seen.

Seems like Asus wins out. However I will admit it has some shortcoming when it comes to trying to fit other PCI cards into the system while trying to maintain a cool temperatue inside the case.

But with true x16 combined with the other awesome features I think that I will go with Asus even with the shortcomings.
 
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