Fricking Abit motherboard!

[Bateluer]

This damn IN9 is so touchy with RAM timings, its unreal! I've 4x1GB sticks of DDR2-800 installed, 2 are SuperTalent, 2 or Muskin. When I upgraded from me E6600 to my E8500, the ram timings went bonkers, literally. They would flip between 4-4-4-12 and 5-5-5-15 and refuse to POST with all four sticks installed. It took several attempts using both pairs separately, then together.

Last night, a storm caused a power loss. Hit the power button this morning, memory timings are hosed again. I don't have time to futz with this crap in the morning, so I'm running my system on 2GBs right now. I'll play the swaptronics, pop and swap game when I get home from work.

Honestly, I've got half a mind to just buy some 2x2GB sticks. The only thing that holds me back is that my next upgrade will undoubtedly be using DDR3 and replacing RAM will leave me with a large stock of DDR2. Course, that scenario is more than a year away.

Cliffs
-Lousy Abit motherboard has lousy ram timing detection and touchy manual timing control

 

[Scarpozzi]

Wrong forum....even though it is a rant.

I quit building PCs for this very reason....well, that and because they're cheaper to buy most of the time. I hated dealing with the motherboard companies and having to research every system for known driver problems and OS compatibility. Heck...I do that stuff every day at work. At least with the major manufacturers like Dell and HP you can get a system that's had all of its pieces tested together. I usually still bump up the memory on those, but have never had any problems.

 

[TwiceOver]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
Wrong forum....even though it is a rant.

I quit building PCs for this very reason....well, that and because they're cheaper to buy most of the time. I hated dealing with the motherboard companies and having to research every system for known driver problems and OS compatibility. Heck...I do that stuff every day at work. At least with the major manufacturers like Dell and HP you can get a system that's had all of its pieces tested together. I usually still bump up the memory on those, but have never had any problems.

This.

For me because component prices are getting outrageous. Remember when a $100 motherboard would bring top of the line performance? Yeah, try $400 motherboard these days. Everything else is around the same price. But they decided to put more crap on the board, half of which goes unused, and then crank up the price due to "features".

 

[amdhunter]

Originally posted by: TwiceOver

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
Wrong forum....even though it is a rant.

I quit building PCs for this very reason....well, that and because they're cheaper to buy most of the time. I hated dealing with the motherboard companies and having to research every system for known driver problems and OS compatibility. Heck...I do that stuff every day at work. At least with the major manufacturers like Dell and HP you can get a system that's had all of its pieces tested together. I usually still bump up the memory on those, but have never had any problems.

This.

For me because component prices are getting outrageous. Remember when a $100 motherboard would bring top of the line performance? Yeah, try $400 motherboard these days. Everything else is around the same price. But they decided to put more crap on the board, half of which goes unused, and then crank up the price due to "features".

Yeah, its insane how much motherboards cost these days. I've been in the market for a new motherboard for weeks now, but can't bring myself to pay $200+ dollars for one that probably won't be better than my cheap Gigabyte board which runs my q6600 perfectly fine. I've been looking for a good crossfire board.

 

[Bateluer]

The odds are greater that the sun will go supernova tomorrow than of my buying a prebuilt desktop.

The Abit board has just been flakey. It will be the last Abit board I purchase, after this it will be back to Asus. With the E8500 CPU, it seems more sensitive than it was with the older E6600, but some of it could be caused by the recent 1.5 Bios that I updated to shortly before I installed the E8500.


Performance across motherboards is usually within 1% regardless of whether you pay 100 or 400. And I actually do use most of the features on the higher end boards as well. Gigabit ethernet, integrated sound, all available SATA ports, all available PATA, etc. I don't use the RAID functions, nor have I put a second PCIe video card it. My original intention when I bought the Abit board was to purchase two Nvidia boards for SLI, but their products were all underwhelming and over priced.

My next board will likely be an Asus board with an Intel chipset, unless AMD delivers a competitive CPU in Aug 09, in which case, it will be an Asus/ATI combo.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Building a PC myself is the ONLY way to go....

 

[BlahBlahYouToo]

your problem, 4 sticks of RAM.
try 2 sticks.

and you can get a good P45 mb for $125 with all the bells and whistles you will need. not $400.

 

[amdhunter]

Originally posted by: BlahBlahYouToo
your problem, 4 sticks of RAM.
try 2 sticks.

and you can get a good P45 mb for $125 with all the bells and whistles you will need. not $400.

lol, this is true. But my mind says x48. I upgrade maybe once every 18 months, so I want the latest and greatest.

 

[mcvickj]

I haven't used an ABIT board since my old KT7A. That thing was a rock and is still happily chugging along. My last 5 boards have all been ASUS boards and I've never had any complaints.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: BlahBlahYouToo
your problem, 4 sticks of RAM.
try 2 sticks.

and you can get a good P45 mb for $125 with all the bells and whistles you will need. not $400.

You can today, when I bought the Abit board in FEb 07, finding a motherboard with 6 or more SATA ports, plus the PCIe 16x slots and other bells and whistles, was nearly impossible. As I recall, the Abit was the only other board aside from the Asus Striker at the time.

Today, I see P45 boards with 10 SATA ports, but they also have 4 gigabit ethernet ports, which is a waste for my purposes. I would definitely make use of the SATA ports, but I only need 1 gigabit port. A moot point now because I am definitely not going to upgrade the board until, hopefully, Westmere.

I suppose, if I did buy 2x2GB sticks, I could move each brand my current 1GB sticks over to my test beds. They use DDR2 RAM, but currently have 2x512MBs, I believe. They could bump up to 2GB each easily enough, then I'd have to sell or donate 4x512MB sticks of DDR2-667.

 

[IEC]

<-- Happy ABIT IP-35E user.

Great OC/enthusiast board that cost me $60AR. It's been rock solid for me.

 

[potato28]

Building PC's are tons of fun, but I've never ran with 4 sticks of RAM just because I know that will make most motherboards go all screwy. I still need to get a new motherboard, mine doesn't overclock very well.

 

[Sphexi]

I've used Gigabyte for my last few builds, works great. I have a P35 powering my Q6600 for my main box, and an EP31 powering my HTPC. Both work great, I just threw in my memory (whatever was cheaper) which is usually OCZ DDR2-800, no issues at all.

 

[PottedMeat]

And they're out?

Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market

http://hardware.slashdot.org/a...l?sid=08/08/28/1838236

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Originally posted by: PottedMeat

And they're out?

Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market

http://hardware.slashdot.org/a...l?sid=08/08/28/1838236

I heard about this yesterday. Kinda sad, while I haven't purchased any of their stuff in years, the BX6 rev2 is what got me and a lot of people into overclocking. And lets not forget the BP6. That allowed the use of 2 socket 370 cpus on the 440BX chipset.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Abit used to be great, but back around the era of the great caps of fire they got a bad rep and never had a winner like the BP6 to recover.

And as far as building being expensive, I built a complete system w/ 4GB RAM, quadcore CPU, and 9600GT video back in March (when the 9600GT was good stuff for about three weeks...) for about $800 shipped (after tax). It's hard to find and OEM that'll do that without having you "step up" and pay for a bunch of crap you don't want/need. The $400 thing is a lot like most expensive cars. Sure, they're nice, but not THAT much nicer.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: potato28
Building PC's are tons of fun, but I've never ran with 4 sticks of RAM just because I know that will make most motherboards go all screwy. I still need to get a new motherboard, mine doesn't overclock very well.

I'm running 4x1GB SuperTalent DDR2-667 in my IP35-E with no issues.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski

Originally posted by: PottedMeat

And they're out?

Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market

http://hardware.slashdot.org/a...l?sid=08/08/28/1838236

I heard about this yesterday. Kinda sad, while I haven't purchased any of their stuff in years, the BX6 rev2 is what got me and a lot of people into overclocking. And lets not forget the BP6. That allowed the use of 2 socket 370 cpus on the 440BX chipset.

Abit wasn't the only manufacturer to be affected by the bad capacitors though, those made their into boards from everybody. Asus, MSI, Gigabte, ECS, Biostar, etc all effected.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: PottedMeat

And they're out?

Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market

http://hardware.slashdot.org/a...l?sid=08/08/28/1838236

Noooooo....

RIP ABIT, how my Celeron 300A @ 450, Athlon XP 2700+, and E2140 have loved thee.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Originally posted by: Spartan Niner

Originally posted by: potato28
Building PC's are tons of fun, but I've never ran with 4 sticks of RAM just because I know that will make most motherboards go all screwy. I still need to get a new motherboard, mine doesn't overclock very well.

I'm running 4x1GB SuperTalent DDR2-667 in my IP35-E with no issues.

My 939 system never was happy running 4 DIMMs mixed. I ended up with a few spare DDR-400 DIMMs because of it. The best stable result I had was 1.5GB. My 754 system was picky about it's three DIMMs as well, certain combos would drop it to 266. My goals to get 2GB on the 939 and 1GB on the 754 with upgrades (from 1GB and 512MB respectively) were never realized because I got tired of throwing out money. Ended up just making my AM2+ system because DDR2-800 was so much cheaper than DDR-400.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Bateluer

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski

Originally posted by: PottedMeat

And they're out?

Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market

http://hardware.slashdot.org/a...l?sid=08/08/28/1838236

I heard about this yesterday. Kinda sad, while I haven't purchased any of their stuff in years, the BX6 rev2 is what got me and a lot of people into overclocking. And lets not forget the BP6. That allowed the use of 2 socket 370 cpus on the 440BX chipset.

Abit wasn't the only manufacturer to be affected by the bad capacitors though, those made their into boards from everybody. Asus, MSI, Gigabte, ECS, Biostar, etc all effected.

I thought abit was the only maker that actually fessed up to it? I don't remember. I remember I had a bunch of IBM p3 machines from that era at work, and every single one of them died due to bad caps.

 

[Baked]

Let me be the 1st to say, WRONG FORUM!

With that said, I got no problem w/ my current Abit mobo and OCZ RAM combo. I've always had pretty good luck w/ mobo and RAM choices, especially OCZ RAM. I got some SLI-ready 2x2GB OCZ running in my IP35-Pro, w/ a E8400.

 

[AmberClad]

Originally posted by: Baked
Let me be the 1st to say, WRONG FORUM!

:laugh:
Gotta love a site where posting a motherboards related thread in the "Off Topic" forum is considered off topic.

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: Bateluer

The Abit board has just been flakey. It will be the last Abit board I purchase, after this it will be back to Asus.

The IN9 32X actually eventually turned into 1 of the better 680i SLIs but I wouldn't hold anybody's nForce 6xx SLi against them, it's just a poor chipset.
Look at the fight that people on this forum had with Gigabyte over theirs.

Even today on OcUK you'll find the Asus P5N-T (780i but that's basically a 680i with a PCI-E 2.0 bridge chip) nominated for worst mobo ever but I don't hold Asus at fault for that.