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How can we say that MSI and Gigabyte are Tier 2 mobo, sorry but I totally disagree with this. When ever I build a PC, my first two mobo's that get first prefernce are MSI and Gigabyte.

Also I've heard from a few shop vendors here in Melbourne, Australia that Asus has dropped alot if quality control, and this is what has given them a slightly bad name.

I've always found MSI boards to be rich in features and value for money, infact even more so than any Asus board.

I've got MSI and Gigabyte boards in all my 5 PC's here and all work excellent.

Also lets not forget that MSI is the usual number 1 choice for refernce mobo when a company needs to do a testing on something or like a new product.

How can we say that MSI and Gigabyte are Tier 2 mobo, sorry but I totally disagree with this. When ever I build a PC, my first two mobo's that get first prefernce are MSI and Gigabyte.

Also I've heard from a few shop vendors here in Melbourne, Australia that Asus has dropped alot in quality control, and this is what has given them a slightly bad name.

I've always found MSI boards to be rich in features and value for money, infact even more so than any Asus board.

I've got MSI and Gigabyte boards in all my 5 PC's here and all work excellent.

Also lets not forget that MSI is the usual number 1 choice for refernce mobo when a company needs to do a testing on something or like a new product.

For me it has always been MSI. Asus used to be good but should agree regarding the drop on quality control. Also Asus has started trimming the ends to reduce manufacturing cost, ie: not much extra stuff delivered with their mobos. From recently though Chaintech has been catching my eye with loads of extra bells and whilstles thrown in. Have already decided to go with Chaintech for my next AMD upgrade.

Surely would like to know the opinion of any Chaintech users out there.

Cheers.

I'd also be interested to hear if Biostar is any good; I've never used their boards, but I've seen them on NewEgg.

If your trying to save a couple of bucks (assuming you have a Duron 850)
try the ECS K7S5A Pro ~$40. I've built about 5 systems with them and
have several friends that utilize them for people that are trying to save money. The newer version (Pro) was released about 6 months ago and supports AMD Athlon Thunderbird, Duron and Palomino (XP), USB 2.0,onbaord 5.1 audio, built-in 10BaseT/100BaseTX Network Interface.
A big benefit is you can use either SDRAM or DDRAM.
Hope this helps and here is a link.
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=687006/ut=411af0e473ffc805

CDRecorder wrote:I'd also be interested to hear if Biostar is any good; I've never used their boards, but I've seen them on NewEgg.

i don't remember where i read this quite a while ago (anandtech ?) but as i recall Biostar is supposed to be quite a name in the server market.

Thanks! That's good to know.

welcome but like i said this is a faint memory ... i'm not 100% sure i remember correctly. you'll need to do some research on it (if it's important to you).

my sister's older computer (Pentium III 450MHz, 4-5 years old now) is on a Biostar motherboard, never gave her any trouble at all. that computer and motherboard still work just fine. despite the fact that two (!) modem PCI cards died while on it from lightning.