The boards I've personally used in the past have been Asus, Abit, MSI, and DFI.Seggybop wrote:If you use the Google, you'll find reports of failure for every manufacturer. I've personally witnessed 3 incidences of Asus parts dying. I've also seen plenty of cases where they last forever.
That the Gigabyte parts seem to fail in a relatively consistent way every time I've been there to see it does indicate to me that they have some specific issues.
Out of all of the different systems I've built over the years, the only ones I had any issues at all from were an Asus A7N8X Deluxe and a DFI LanParty nf3-250Gb.
In both cases, the problems were Chipset/BIOS incompatibilities with my specific hardware setups that were later rectified with updated firmware.
I did get a DOA Asus S939 board once, but it was an 'open box' from Zipzoomfly* and I think it was more ZZF's fault than Asus's.
My own system is built around a MSI 945P Neo-3F board, and while I did have an initial USB problem with it, a search of MSI's forums revealed both the cause of the problem and the easy fix.
My reasons for not going with an Asus board this time around were three.
One is purely personal in that Asus's website is *painfully* slow to load and that affected my obtaining BIOS/driver updates.
Two is that the MSI was about $20 cheaper at the time.
And three is that at the time of purchase there were two revisions of the Asus board out (one supported the C2D, the other didn't) and I couldn't be guaranteed that I'd get the newer revision.
That said, the Neo-3F is rock stable but it's not a very good overclocker.
*Dead in that it'd boot, but wouldn't install an OS without locking up.
My first clue there was a problem was when I noticed that the memory retention clips on both sockets were missing on the 'north' side of the board. The lower ones were there, but the others were missing.
And ZZF put this board back out for resale.
note: edited for accuracy
