ASUS/ABIT/SOYO what gives you good service?

[Crucifier]

Talk about stress! Shopping for a new motherboard nowadays for an Anthlon XP can make your hair turn gray!

I am not asking for folks to tell me what motherboard to buy, but I am asking for people's personal experience on the ASUS A7V266E RAID, Soyo Dragon Plus RAID and Abit KR7A133 RAID. I dabble in over clocking but not extreme and I intend to use the RAID this time around.

ASUS has been my primary choice over the years since they have a great rep and made great boards. I used EPoX once..four RMAed boards later I swapped for yet another ASUS which is still flying. Things have indeed changed with other manufacturers making great boards...or so the story goes.

I currently have an ABIT KT7A RAID (non raided) with an Anthlon 1 gig/266 (GF3, 512meg Crucial ram, SB Live!, 20 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm hd, antec 300W ps). Over the past two or three months have experienced stability related problems..boot up issues (normally associated with memory..but changed out sticks, bought new ram, etc no change/formatted/flashed/installed driver after driver). In short what I am trying to say is I am a bit nervous about going with another ABIT. I have been reading at various websites and message boards (as others have posted also) that ABIT has a rep for RMA's . The following taken from ard|OCP:
Still, while ABIT has become famous for performance mainboards over the years, they have also become famous for RMAed boards

Has Abit managed to change this trend?

 

[WhiteWizard]

Modern Epox seems to work very nice, they are cheap, and even if they burn in a year or two, you probably can buy almost 2 for the price of an ASUS. I have bad experiences with Epox old boards (7KXA,8KTA,MVP4) but even those problems had a solution, exept perhaps the cracking sound with 3DFx cards and SB Sound solutions.
Abit has a reputation going up every day, and if you look in the forums, you'll found few issues with their boards.
I personally don't like the SOYOs, because my DRAGON refused to power up a ZIP 250 USB, and the ASUS A7A266 wicht is in front of the SOYO did that well. On the other hand, I buy a DRAGON + and it refused to change the multiplier of my Athlon 1.2B, just to put it at 133Mhz*10 (1333Mhz). No happy with that, it hang at every setting and only way to turn it on again was clearing the CMOS memory with the Jumper. So I changed the + for the A7V266-E, it accepted my OC. but not stable at 1333Mhz, so I'm using it at 1266Mhz now, no much OC, but no power increase atempted, I don't like that!. Anyway all ASUS enter in default processor settings if OC fails, no need to use jumpers!.
The DRAGON + also was unstable with PERFORMANCE settings and only work good at NORMAL performance and standar procesor settings, but took too much time in POST.
Perhaps all problems are related to my 2 unbranded 256Mb DDR PC2100 sticks.
So I keep the DRAGON (brught it last year) , and the A7V266-E and return the DRAGON+ in exchange (add some money ofcourse!).
In the ASUS A7V266-E I had the Infinite Loop, using the last Detonator drivers, so I change some settings in memory (were absolutely at max. settings), and now is as stable as my previous A7V133 and A7V.
But if I could make the buy again, I surelely try the Abit and save some money!

ASUS A7V266-E
Athlon t-bird 1.2B @ 1266Mhz
Titan D5T cooler
512Mb PC2100 unbranded
CL Anihilator II (gForce2 GTS 32Mb DDR)
CL Live! Platinium
3Com NIC
2xIBM Desktar 15Gb on RAID 0 (Promise)
DVD and CDROM on ATA channel