"Good Motherboard"
Pros
Stable, reliable
Cons
Not super-fast. Iffy tech support.
Summary
I am having a generally good experience with this motherboard, with the following additional notes.
Some people have complained that the board is irregularly sized. I did not have this problem. My case accommodates all sorts of motherboards, so all I had to do was to move a couple of ... Read full review
I am having a generally good experience with this motherboard, with the following additional notes.
Some people have complained that the board is irregularly sized. I did not have this problem. My case accommodates all sorts of motherboards, so all I had to do was to move a couple of mounting posts.
I actually preferred the smaller motherboard. It gave me more space to route ribbon cables to the floppy and the IDE drives.
Included SATA cables that snapped into place. This gave me a positive sense that my hard drive was securely attached to the motherboard. I didn’t get that with the cheap connectors they used on the SATA cables supplied with my previous motherboard, an MSI.
The supplied CD was useless for installing drivers.
Their tech support line was busy when I called at 12:30 PM on a Thursday to double-check that my first board really was DOA. Redialing got me through. They put me on hold with really awful music that constantly kept changing volume. I was on hold for only about five minutes. The technician quickly directed me to the solution to my problem. Neither the troubleshooting section of the manual nor their webpage had described the particular pattern of beeps I was getting on bootup (three long, one short, a pause, then continuous long beeps), and neither had explained (as the tech support person did explain) that a memory problem, as indicated by these beeps, would exist not only (a) if I had a bad RAM stick but also (b) if I took all of the RAM out of the system.
Their tech support website indicates that they determine warranty date based upon date of manufacture. They do not do cross-shipping under any circumstances, so if you need to replace your motherboard, they advise you to expect a turnaround time of two to three weeks – which is, of course, ridiculous for people who actually use their computers.