Originally posted by: John
Originally posted by: txxxxThis is the 3rd MSI board ive witness die...
I have been building and servicing pc's since 1998, and I have seen dozens of defective MSI boards. From DOA to leaking capacitors....you name it.
MSI does not have a quality control problem.
Nope. Just an overall quality problem, from what I can see.
PS. Doesn't the mere fact that you've seen their boards, with leaky caps, indicate to you that they have problems? Other mfgs that were willing to pay $1-2 more for components, seem to have a much lower incidence of the "leaky/bad cap problem", if they were even affected at all. (Tyan, SuperMicro, etc.)
In fact, that's one rough rule-of-thumb that you can use to determine the quality of mfg of a board - the number and quality/size of the caps used, along with a few other things. I was quite concerned when I purchased my (yes, MSI) KT4V-L mobo, and found so many silkscreened spots on the board for caps, and yet they weren't fitted to the board. I thought initially that my board was a mfg error! Turns out it wasn't, and that they removed most of the power-filtration caps between the PCI slots, just to save money. Needless to say, my next mobo purchase WILL NOT be MSI. I'm ashamed that I helped point someone else towards the MSI 865PE Neo2-P Platinum socket478 board, because it's been occasionally randomly flaky on them. Prime95/Memtest86 overnight don't show any issues, only the system tends to BSOD with random errors under heavy overall load. I'm assuming that it could be the caps, even though MSI makes a big deal in their PR about using "high quality Japanese capacitors" on that particular board. Nevermind the fact that it uses a decidedly sub-standard two-phase power-regulation system (even though it is supposed to be Prescott-compliant), when all of the other mobo makers are using three-phase. (Or dual-redundant three-phase, like Gigabyte.)
MSI is a high-volume, low-quality mfg these days. Possibly even moreso than PCChips, if you can believe that. At least IMO.