Chronic instability on MSI K7T Pro2A -- attempt to contact tech support failed!

[Octoberblue]

Well, the great thing about Asus though is that you almost never need tech support. I know, I know, sometimes you do and they stink b/c they basically don't give it. Asus is a huge company and they appear to have decided to provide tech support through very high quality BIOS updates alone; and if the update doesn't solve you're problem they just figure you'll RMA the board.

I will continue to buy Asus products b/c it is extremely rare for them to have the kind of meltdowns I'm hearing about with these other boards. Yeah, there are driver glitches and issues like that, but seriously, big-time problems are very rare. If I get an Asus board and it has a problem I'll RMA it immediately b/c I know their tech support won't be of much use. And on the unusual occasion when you do get a bad board from them, you'll know once it's replaced you'll have a great board.

Besides, it appears that these other companies aren't exactly providing much tech support either.

 

[Leo V]

nortexoid, I wouln't expect a VIA supporter to realize, however this is anything but the first problem I've encountered with a VIA chipset. Each VIA-based system I built gave me an unjustifiable headache, in all cases thanks to VIA's slimy chipsets. Well, enough already. I've emailed MSI and John is taking back my mobo. Good night all

 

[Charles]

Leo, so the problem wasn't the CPU voltage?

 

[Leo V]

Charles, not in the slightest! The CPU is probably rock stable all the way to 1.525V. But I did blame my problems on undervolting at first

 

[jonnyGURU]

LeoV: One thing I have to wonder is WHY YOU ARE FORCED TO CONTACT MSI YOURSELF????

My work buys and sells 200 to 300 MSI units per week and we NEVER have to make contact with MSI ourselves. We contact OUR distributor who then deals with MSI directly. Your MSI comes with a one year warranty that is supposed to be handled by your dealer. You shouldn't be mad at MSI. You should be mad at who sold it to you if they're not supporting the board. But, seeing how you bought the board from John, and that I know that the John here is actually a good guy (if it's the Elite Member John I think it is), I'll refrain from such accusations, but John bought that motherboard from a wholesaler just like my work does and has an avenue for RMA for exchange. If he can't do it, for whatever reason, email me and I'll see what I can do since I have been in the computer retail industry for 6 years and have accumulated many friends. No promises, but I can try.

<edit> After scrolling through the numerous posts in this thread, I see that the John IS the John I thought it was and John did offer an exchange. Leo: JUST EXCHANGE THE FSCKING BOARD WITH JOHN! </edit>

You can not demand your money back from MSI in that MSI did not take your money and quite frankly, the person that sold you the board did not give that money directly to MSI either since it is unlikely that they bought the board direct from MSI.

As far as the quality of the board and it's stability; I still stand behind it 100% personally. I run a WD ATA100 on mine and use an IBM ATA100 drive on it at work and if a board can't run countless loops of Final Reality or 3D Mark 2000, then it certainly isn't stable and I've never had a problem with either. My friend/co-worker Stan (StanFL on this board) runs Win2K on it with Maxtor ATA100 drives. No problems there either.

To date we have sold nearly 800 units and I've only gotten three back and only one was DOA. The other two were flaky floppy controllers and the boards worked fine otherwise. Never have I had one with a stability problem. Do I need to tell you how many Abit boards I RMAd today alone? I'll give you a hint: It's three times as many of the A7Vs we RMAd and we sell the same amount of both. You know how many I see a week that have HPT370 issues (not Abit's fault, but it's on Abit's board).

You're not used to this industry, I can tell. The dead give away is this line: &quot;On the rare occasions when they don't, Intel replaces them instead of shoving 'new beta 4-in-1 drivers ought to fix it' bullsh1t down their customers' throats while keeping a poker face.&quot; So if my Asus P3V4X is unstable Intel should support it? If my MSI BX Master is unstable Intel should support it? No. Intel doesn't support anything but what they manufacture and that's the CPU. And frankly AMD is the same way. And I'm not saying this as any kind of zealot. I have an Athlon 900 and PII 750 and a PII 450, so currently the Intels out number the AMDs 2 to 1 in my house and by the way, the Athlon is on an MSI board that I've had since November.

It replaced an Abit board that I had stability issues with.... I kid you not.

 

[jonnyGURU]

Octoberblue: Wrong. Asus is THE ONLY COMPANY I've resorted to calling tech support for because it is the only board I&quot;ve ever had to service that did &quot;inexplainable things&quot;.

Leo: Good to see you're taking John up on his offer. Should've started there if you were to ask me. Another board should do the trick. You probably just got a rare bad one.

I hate these long threads. You always miss messages scrolling through.

 

[Rifter]

I have a Pro2-A and my DVD drive and burner both work fine with DMA on, Also i have never had any crashes that were the fault of the mobo, actually i have only had one or 2 crashes since i got the board almost 2 onths ago. IMO it is a stable well made board even overclocked. Just beacuse 2 people have problems doesnt mean all the boards are defective.

 

[Maverick]

Rifter its more than just two people. There's at least ten other reports of malfunctions on this thread alone. It would appear that the problems lie solely in the 686B Southbridge.

 

[Stark]

Well, I've built 3 systems on the K7A Pro 2A and they're the best systems I've built (out of 100 or so). I hated via/AMD back in the K6-2 days and advised everyone I knew to buy Intel. My current home system is a K7A Pro 2A with an 850 Athlon that replaced a PIII 700. To be honest, I'm only using a 20GB maxtor ata-66 drive, so perhaps there is some truth to these problems.

In a related story, I just built four athlon 900 systems for a customer using the FIC AZ11 board, and it's been a nightmare. Our local distributor (Ingram) was out of the MSI boards, and asus didn't fit in the customer budget so I took a chance... BIG MISTAKE. These systems boot to the 98se desktop, freeze, and reboot 2-3 times before finally loading windows. They also lockup frequently. The problem seems to be incompatability with ata-100 drives. I've tried WD and Quantum ata-100 drives and experienced the same problems. Switching to a 6.4 gb ata33 maxtor, the system was stable. I even tried using pci promise ata-100 cards... still experiencing lockups and reboots.

These FIC pieces of garbage are on their way back to the distributor as soon as MSI replacements come in tomorrow.

I appreciate threads like this where problems are reported. Coming to conclusions that MSI, Via, or AMD are shoddy companies, however, is simply foolish.

Someone quoted pabst earlier in the thread, and in that same story he says

<< But customers will now have to adjust their thinking. Anyone who thinks Intel platforms are the more reliable is mistaken as Intel's recall of Pentium III 1.13 GHz proves. Anyone using an Athlon system as server today has found a cost-effective alternative. >>


My boss is an Intel zealot, and 99.9 of the systems we build are intel based. It is only after seeing, first hand, Intel's &quot;quality control&quot; that I made the personal decision to go AMD. I haven't regretted it.

 

[PCResources]

About this instability issue... What can i say...

I have built many systems, and NEVER encoutered any problems like the ones described in this thread...

I sure hope that your trouble will sort out...

If it doesn't i would be happy to work something out with you...

BTW, it is not Patrick AT PC Resources, it is Patrick who owns PC Resources, i am the founder of this company.


Patrick Palm

Am speaking for PC Resources

 

[Regalk]

Anyway once you guys are finished tumbling all over yourselves please read this - it may be useful
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?articleid=RWT012301000000

 

[Mooncalf]

Linked

 

[Modus]

JohhnyGURU,

Thank you so much for such a fresh dose of reality. It's good that Leo is doing what we told him to do from the start. The RealWorld tech article proves that there are NO problems with the design of VIA's 686B southbridge, and the vast collective experience of you, I, Red Dawn, PC Resources, and John proves that the MSI K7T-Pro-2a is indeed a rock solid board with an excellent quality rating.

Leo V,

When you get the new board back, we'll help you get it stable. There's you've gotta follow to eliminate each and every variable, and you can't cut corners. I know it takes time and can be agravating, but we've all been there. You just happened to be one of the unlucky few to land a bad board.

Modus

 

[holdencommodore]

The RealWorld tech article did not test the MSI motherboards. This should mean that it rules out the 686B as being the problem.
Maybe Anandtech could compare the MSI K7T Pro2, and Pro2-A, just to see if Tom's article is correct?? I am sure that any of these problems will be sorted out in future BIOS updates.

I am very pleased with the K7T Pro2-A currently.

 

[McMadman]

I myself am somewhat disappointed in my Pro2-A, I bought it hoping it would have been as trouble free as the Pro2 seemed to have been. Instead I spent 2 weeks working on trying to get it stable. I am thinking of trying to get it swapped if I can ever get in touch with a person at monarchcomputer. If I can't swap it, I might just wait until some good KT133A boards come out and sell this one.

 

[Leo V]

Modus, I thank you for the offer, but I'm definitely switching to a different board.

Why?

Because I no longer feel safe using the Pro2A. Before you laugh, read on. I've already done everything conceivable with my board, and quite possibly you're correct in calling it faulty. However, the instability I experienced was treacherously unpredictable and sometimes impossible to reproduce. This means I could at times work for days without problems, only to get a lockup later.

Therefore if I use another Pro2-A, it'll feel like sitting on a time bomb. You know, a big part of stability is your own confidence in your system. That you could (figuratively) trust your life with it. With the treacherous nature of my problems, I could never do that again with MSI. Maybe it's just me but hey, I'm the one using it!

 

[Modus]

Well, you're right that it takes a LONG time to truly diagnose a stability problem. If your reseller is kind enough to give you a different board (he'll then be stuck with yours) then I guess that's the easiest route. But I still think you have a defective sample of a very good board.

Modus

 

[LXi]

Leo V:

Is that the same as saying if you ever get a Sony lemon, you'd never get another Sony in your life?

 

[Leo V]

LXi:
1) Sony has a long, well-established reputation for quality, like Asus motherboards
2) The concept of &quot;stability&quot; doesn't apply to a monitor; it generally either works upfront or doesn't. Sony defects would not be extremely treacherous like mine. If I and many others experienced sneak-attack defects, I may very well stop buying Sony. However, both my Sony monitors (including my refurbished G500) work beautifully. Banged-up monitors would be replaced without 10 hours of me troubleshooting just to find what caused the problems!

 

[LXi]

<<1) Sony has a long, well-established reputation for quality, like Asus motherboards>>

Yes MSI is a late comer, but they do have a well established reputation for quality, they're not a company that generally makes crap or unstable motherboards, pretty much like Asus.


<<2) The concept of &quot;stability&quot; doesn't apply to a monitor; it generally either works upfront or doesn't. Sony defects would not be extremely treacherous like mine. If I and many others experienced sneak-attack defects, I may very well stop buying Sony.>>

Applying two standards there? Im using the anology of theh stability of a mobo and the image quality of a monitor. You have had one bad experience with MSI, and that was enough for you to not touch them again, but it takes &quot;many&quot; bad Sony experiences of your own and the others to stop buying Sony. Whats with that? Not even to mention that there are great many number of &quot;silent&quot; happy Pro2A owners out there.


<<However, both my Sony monitors (including my refurbished G500) work beautifully. Banged-up monitors would be replaced without 10 hours of me troubleshooting just to find what caused the problems! >>

Its not going to take you 10 hrs to replace your mobo, now is it? Give MSI another shot.

 

[Sundog]

<< Sony has a long, well-established reputation for quality, like Asus motherboards >>



Like ASUS is exactly what I thought until I had an A7V board. Same problems, even worse in my case. ASUS built in a Promise 100 controller on the board. The ONLY way that board worked with my config. was to abandon the ATA100 controller, move everything over to the VIA66 controller and disable the ATA100 controller in the BIOS. Only then did it run stable.

So ASUS is having problems too with the ATA100 controller issue.
Link to a site dedicated to nothing but ASUS A7V probs:Asus A7V Troubleshooting


I just switched over to a MSI K7V Pro2-A from ASUS.

 

[NOX]

I?m currently building my second system based on the MSI K7T Pro2a, using IBM GXP ATA100 hard drive and have yet to experience any problems.

Uh...maybe luck.

[EDIT]

Forgot the &quot;a&quot; after 2.

 

[Leo V]

I should've mentioned... I avoid onboard ATA controllers like the plague. If I buy Asus, it would be the A7V Pro.

LXi, you've deliberately misread what I said. I didn't say that I'd tolerate more from a Sony monitor. If I received a bad Sony, I'd immediately get it replaced without fuss, no big deal. If, however, I received what seems like a good Sony but one that craps out under the most unpredictable circumstances (like the MSI), I'd switch over to someone else.

Of course, (good) monitors have the advantage that such &quot;hidden&quot; problems practically never happen to them. That's all the more reason for unprecedented quality control in ultracomplex devices like motherboards.

 

[UKspace]

I am confuesed.

Being newbie to building PC's I was stuck choosing the Mobo.

Advised to get ABIT KT7-RAID
So I thought great, then told no this board is of poor quality and bits will fall off after a month.

So was told to get ASUS A7V.
Thought great problem solved. WRONG! Come on these forums and told that MSI were the best. Their boards rocked! You couldn't crash them if you drove a car into them!

Now I read that the MSi K7T Pro 2a is also problematic.

Is it any wonder I'm confused!?

 

[formulav8]

UKSpace. They are all great boards. People say they suck just because they have a problem with it. You should be happy with either board. Just ignore what 1 or 2 others say about a board.