Cost-effective Quad core system

On Sun, 18 May 2008 19:39:22 -0700, "Tim S." wrote:


"R" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 18 May 2008 18:34:31 -0700, "Tim S." wrote:


"R" wrote in message
...
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?

I've had both and currently running a Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS4 rev 2.0 and to
be
honest I think both have their problems. I think I'm going to try DFI
next.
I have heard some really positive things about both DFI and EVGA.

Good Luck
Tim

That doesn't sound promising. I've used Asus for many years, and
always had faith in their quality. Now they seem to be trending toward
the same mass-produced low-quality that characterized their
competition in the past. You have to wonder why they would not try to
maintain their distinct spot in the marketplace.

I was hoping to choose by feature set, but the comments about quality
lapse of Asus put a different spin on things. Given the disastrous
consequences of motherboard failure, I will definitely spend more for
some insurance. And forego a few ports or whatever.

So, are DFI and EVGA the way to go? Anyone?


Check out the Motherboard reviews on www.newegg.com Maybe that could ease
some of your fears.

Tim

Or instill more fear and trepidation. g I appreciate the
recommendation, but so many of those reviews are posted by people with
relatively narrow experience. Tough to sort them out, so I figured I'd
ask here. There are some (like Paul) who obviously have quite a bit of
experience. I've seen some great comments of features, but given the
comments I've seen on some hardware websites, I thought it would be
best to review things from the viewpoint of reliability.

After all, those nice features won't be of use if the board fails. g

"Monty" wrote in message
...
"Tim S." wrote:


"R" wrote in message
. ..
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?

I've had both and currently running a Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS4 rev 2.0 and to
be
honest I think both have their problems.
I am running the same board with an Intel 6750 and have had no
problems in 6 months. Would you care to describe the problems with
the Gigabyte board that you are aware of?

Monty

Monty,

You may want to go to www.forums.tweaktown.com and look around. Do a search
on DPC latency spiking and then just look at a few of the other posts on
this board. It seems that most all new Gigabyte boards have problems with
little or no support from Gigabyte.

Tim

"Monty" wrote in message
...
"Tim S." wrote:


"R" wrote in message
. ..
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?

I've had both and currently running a Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS4 rev 2.0 and to
be
honest I think both have their problems.
I am running the same board with an Intel 6750 and have had no
problems in 6 months. Would you care to describe the problems with
the Gigabyte board that you are aware of?

Monty

Monty,

You may want to go to forums.tweaktown.com and look around. Do a search
on DPC latency spiking and then just look at a few of the other posts on
this board. It seems that most all new Gigabyte boards have problems with
little or no support from Gigabyte.

Tim

"Tim S." wrote in message
...

"Monty" wrote in message
...
"Tim S." wrote:


"R" wrote in message
...
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?

I've had both and currently running a Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS4 rev 2.0 and to
be
honest I think both have their problems.
I am running the same board with an Intel 6750 and have had no
problems in 6 months. Would you care to describe the problems with
the Gigabyte board that you are aware of?

Monty

Monty,

You may want to go to forums.tweaktown.com and look around. Do a search
on DPC latency spiking and then just look at a few of the other posts on
this board. It seems that most all new Gigabyte boards have problems with
little or no support from Gigabyte.

Tim


Errr try this link http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/

On Mon, 19 May 2008 06:36:32 -0400, R wrote:

That doesn't sound promising. I've used Asus for many years, and
always had faith in their quality. Now they seem to be trending toward
the same mass-produced low-quality that characterized their
competition in the past. You have to wonder why they would not try to
maintain their distinct spot in the marketplace.

I was hoping to choose by feature set, but the comments about quality
lapse of Asus put a different spin on things. Given the disastrous
consequences of motherboard failure, I will definitely spend more for
some insurance. And forego a few ports or whatever.

So, are DFI and EVGA the way to go? Anyone?


Check out the Motherboard reviews on www.newegg.com Maybe that could ease
some of your fears.

Tim

Or instill more fear and trepidation. g I appreciate the
recommendation, but so many of those reviews are posted by people with
relatively narrow experience. Tough to sort them out, so I figured I'd
ask here. There are some (like Paul) who obviously have quite a bit of
experience. I've seen some great comments of features, but given the
comments I've seen on some hardware websites, I thought it would be
best to review things from the viewpoint of reliability.

After all, those nice features won't be of use if the board fails. g


Another thought is to pick a candidate mobo manufacturere and see if
there is a newsgroup for that brand and visit there to ask opinions.
(It looks like you're already doing that for Asus and Gigabyte. What
are you hearing in the GB group?)

Reply-to address is real
John

On Mon, 19 May 2008 21:01:15 -0400, John
wrote:

On Mon, 19 May 2008 06:36:32 -0400, R wrote:


Check out the Motherboard reviews on www.newegg.com Maybe that could ease
some of your fears.

Tim

Or instill more fear and trepidation. g I appreciate the
recommendation, but so many of those reviews are posted by people with
relatively narrow experience. Tough to sort them out, so I figured I'd
ask here. There are some (like Paul) who obviously have quite a bit of
experience. I've seen some great comments of features, but given the
comments I've seen on some hardware websites, I thought it would be
best to review things from the viewpoint of reliability.

After all, those nice features won't be of use if the board fails. g


Another thought is to pick a candidate mobo manufacturere and see if
there is a newsgroup for that brand and visit there to ask opinions.
(It looks like you're already doing that for Asus and Gigabyte. What
are you hearing in the GB group?)

Hi John,

Nothing really conclusive from the Gigabyte group, but some mention of
'little support.' That's a major thing. I'm still not decided but now
tending toward the Asus P5K-E.

Somewhere on teh intarweb "georgie" typed:
On Tue, 20 May 2008 07:32:47 -0400, R wrote:



Nothing really conclusive from the Gigabyte group, but some mention
of 'little support.' That's a major thing. I'm still not decided
but now tending toward the Asus P5K-E.


The best thing to do is read a lot of reviews and try and look for
the people who obviously know what they're talking about and not the
"gee mine is great" idiots.

Gee, my P5K-E (WiFi/AP) is great!!!!!!!

Seriously, it's a good board. I've had it through about 6 BIOS updates, it's
running my E4500 (2.2GHz stock) at 3.2GHz (400/1600 FSB) just fine. In fact
it'll run it at 3.3GHz (413/1652 FSB) Prime/Orthos-stable too but I always
like to back off a notch or two unless I really need the power.

Any of the P5K range *lower* than the -E version are to be avoided IMO. They
only have a 3-phase VRM (compared to 8-phase in the -E and above).

As a fairly knowledgeable PC guy who's been building my own machines since
the 486 days, I heartilly recommend the P5K-E.
--
Shaun.

In article ,
says...
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?


I've had a few Asus boards over the years, and they've been up
and down. The TX-97 I had was crap, another one was ace. Their
good ones have always been *good*, their not so good ones ...
ouch. And that's been going on for the 20 or so years that I've
been messing about inside computers' guts.

I've also been an Abit fan for a long time. But - um, I've no
idea what happened with them. One thing I know, all the Abit
boards I had were very very good, except for the bx-133-raid
which had the bad capacitor issue, but was brilliant while it
worked. But I declined to buy one of their new ones because
they've excluded too much backwards compatibility. Sorry, but I
still want a com port, a parallel port and a couple of IDE
ports on my mobo.

Comes along Gigabyte. I had issues with one board in the past,
and sent it back. I now think the problem was actually my
satellite internet card, but that's beside the point, couldn't
install OS & drivers properly at the time.

But I've built a number of machines for other people with
Gigabyte boards since, and not a hitch, not a one.

For backwards compatibility I chose the N650sli-ds4 from
Gigabyte. This has, so they claim, especially been designed for
durability. Solid caps, more voltage regulators around the cpu
than any other mainboard of its class, 2 ide, legacy connectors
at the back. It's been simply brilliant in the 9 months or so
that I've had it now. Rock solid.

I sometimes wonder why I never see any queries or comments
about this board here. Either it's so bloody good, that nobody
has problems, or else nobody but me bought one. I wonder .....

Gigabyte tried to break into the market by being a cheap
manufacturer. Now that they are established, it's my impression
that they are trying to make a reputation for themselves by
building *solid*, i.e. reliable and robust stuff. I've used
plenty of their various cards (video, mostly, but etc) and
they've all performed reasonably well or above.

-Peter



--
=========================================
firstname dot lastname at gmail fullstop com

Peter Huebner wrote:
In article ,
says...
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?


I've had a few Asus boards over the years, and they've been up
and down. The TX-97 I had was crap, another one was ace. Their
good ones have always been *good*, their not so good ones ...
ouch. And that's been going on for the 20 or so years that I've
been messing about inside computers' guts.

I've also been an Abit fan for a long time. But - um, I've no
idea what happened with them. One thing I know, all the Abit
boards I had were very very good, except for the bx-133-raid
which had the bad capacitor issue, but was brilliant while it
worked. But I declined to buy one of their new ones because
they've excluded too much backwards compatibility. Sorry, but I
still want a com port, a parallel port and a couple of IDE
ports on my mobo.

Comes along Gigabyte. I had issues with one board in the past,
and sent it back. I now think the problem was actually my
satellite internet card, but that's beside the point, couldn't
install OS & drivers properly at the time.

But I've built a number of machines for other people with
Gigabyte boards since, and not a hitch, not a one.

For backwards compatibility I chose the N650sli-ds4 from
Gigabyte. This has, so they claim, especially been designed for
durability. Solid caps, more voltage regulators around the cpu
than any other mainboard of its class, 2 ide, legacy connectors
at the back. It's been simply brilliant in the 9 months or so
that I've had it now. Rock solid.

I sometimes wonder why I never see any queries or comments
about this board here. Either it's so bloody good, that nobody
has problems, or else nobody but me bought one. I wonder .....

Gigabyte tried to break into the market by being a cheap
manufacturer. Now that they are established, it's my impression
that they are trying to make a reputation for themselves by
building *solid*, i.e. reliable and robust stuff. I've used
plenty of their various cards (video, mostly, but etc) and
they've all performed reasonably well or above.

-Peter


For what its worth I can second Peter's experience with Gigabyte. I
built my first and only computer in January 07 with the Gigabyte
965P-DS3. It worked immediately and has been flawless ever since. What
more can I say.
OS - Vista Ultimate OEM
Processor - Core2Dual 6600
2 GB RAM
HD - Samsung SATA II 500GB
Video - NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT

Somewhere on teh intarweb "Peter Huebner" typed:
In article ,
says...
Not trying to start a bar fight. I was ready to buy a new Asus
motherboard, but noticed some comments about them on some of the tech
sites. Looks like Asus has a bit of smoke in the cockpit as of late.

Some say that Gigabyte is now a better bet (yeah, it's always a
gamble), but to be fair, I've seen other comments that say "Asus is
getting as bad as Gigabyte."

Again, I know I'm just playing the odds, but is there any truth in
comments about Gigabyte having any edge in quality of components,
etc.?

Hi Peter.

I've had a few Asus boards over the years, and they've been up
and down. The TX-97 I had was crap, another one was ace. Their
good ones have always been *good*, their not so good ones ...
ouch. And that's been going on for the 20 or so years that I've
been messing about inside computers' guts.

I've been a relatively recent convert to Asus but haven't had a bad board
yet. Luck? Going by build quality of the boards I have, I don't think so.
Also, *not* buying the cheapest in a certain range probably has a bit to do
with it.

I've also been an Abit fan for a long time. But - um, I've no
idea what happened with them.

Abit are still around, just not so prominently. I keep hearing rumours that
they're going out of the mobo market....

One thing I know, all the Abit
boards I had were very very good, except for the bx-133-raid
which had the bad capacitor issue, but was brilliant while it
worked.

And that board is the only one that I couldn't ressurect by replacing
capacitors. I messed with it on and off for a couple months but no luck. :-(

Mind you, I have a better stock of better quality replacement capacitors and
better access to suppliers now. :-) Shame I binned the board a while ago,
I'd try it again now with my improved skills/stock. (Then again, maybe the
rot went deeper than capacitors.) I'm still running a few BX boards with Tui
Celerons in them. To get past the ATA33 limitation of the chipset it's just
a matter of a PCI IDE/SATA card. :-)

But I declined to buy one of their new ones because
they've excluded too much backwards compatibility. Sorry, but I
still want a com port, a parallel port and a couple of IDE
ports on my mobo.

Heh! I gave up on compromising my mobo choice for things like that a while
back. I have a parallel port PCI card (not in use), a few IDE/SATA 1.5GB PCI
cards and a couple of external Edgeport USB Expansion Module (Industrial
Series) USB to 4 serial port boxes. (Do you want one? Model 4i, P/N
301-1000-24. Email me if you do.)

Comes along Gigabyte. I had issues with one board in the past,
and sent it back. I now think the problem was actually my
satellite internet card, but that's beside the point, couldn't
install OS & drivers properly at the time.

But I've built a number of machines for other people with
Gigabyte boards since, and not a hitch, not a one.

For backwards compatibility I chose the N650sli-ds4 from
Gigabyte. This has, so they claim, especially been designed for
durability. Solid caps, more voltage regulators around the cpu
than any other mainboard of its class, 2 ide, legacy connectors
at the back. It's been simply brilliant in the 9 months or so
that I've had it now. Rock solid.

Although I use Asus these days, one thing I like about Gigabyte is that they
were the *only* motherboard manufacturer to completely own up to the bad
caps issue. Right up until about a year ago, if you had a Gigabyte mobo that
had failed due to bad caps they would either fix or replace it at no cost,
regardless of warranty status. Now that's what I call impressive! They
learned from it too, and TTBOMK, were the first to go to good quality solid
caps.

Actually, now I think about it, Soltek went part-way towards doing a similar
thing. I know of a few people who complained to them and recieved packets of
replacement, good quality capacitors in the mail. However, within a month
(and before I found out they'd send out replacements and got a chance to
request some caps for the two Soltek boards I have that had blown caps)
they'd disappeared from the face of teh intarweb.

I sometimes wonder why I never see any queries or comments
about this board here. Either it's so bloody good, that nobody
has problems, or else nobody but me bought one. I wonder .....

I've found that, often, the models that we get here aren't sold world-wide.
LOL, that's why I don't recommend certain models without checking location
and availablity anymore.

Gigabyte tried to break into the market by being a cheap
manufacturer. Now that they are established, it's my impression
that they are trying to make a reputation for themselves by
building *solid*, i.e. reliable and robust stuff. I've used
plenty of their various cards (video, mostly, but etc) and
they've all performed reasonably well or above.

I have to agree. Gigabyte are certainly in the top 5, possibly the top 3.

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

DISCLAIMER: If you find a posting or message from me
offensive, inappropriate, or disruptive, please ignore it.
If you don't know how to ignore a posting, complain to
me and I will be only too happy to demonstrate... ;-)