Whats with all the Gigabyte hate?

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Aaron_ATX

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Regardless of the fact I am currently using one...I keep seeing post after post with people hating on gigabyte. What gives?

I have very few complaints about my board and it overclocks well.

Did gigabyte tease you as a kid?

Did gigabyte knock up your sister?

Did gigabyte steal your television?
 
Their Boards are not as solid as ASUS's

Their Boards do not Overclock better than DFI's

Their Boards are alot of money for an average mobo...

Therefor buying Gigabyte = The lose because you can just get a ASUS or DFI board for the same money.
 
I've had a few Gigabyte motherboards.
It's true they don't overclock as well and are a bit spendy.
They have also been some of the most solid motherboards I have ever used, about on par with intel motherboards in quality and stability.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Their Boards are not as solid as ASUS's

Their Boards do not Overclock better than DFI's

Their Boards are alot of money for an average mobo...

Therefor buying Gigabyte = The lose because you can just get a ASUS or DFI board for the same money.
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Exactly, that's what I think. Their boards are pretty--but they don't have it where it counts. They are not the best at anything (overclocking, stability, etc.) but yet they still command the hefty premium of abit/dfi/asus/etc. They always seemed kinda reluctant to cater to enthusiasts--for example, remember how they used to "hide" the advanced ram settings and you had to hit like alt+F2 to access them or something? Also, they provide that awesome 6-phase power-slot thing, but don't allow voltages anywhere NEAR high enough to make it matter.
 
I am currently using a gigabyte board as well, it has been a great overclocker for me and rock solid. This is after using a Asus A8N SLi which constantly corrupted my HDDs, and a MSI K8N Neo 2 which was had the weirdest power on bug.
 
I have nothing against Gigabyte. My old RAMBUS system used a Gigabyte board that served me quite well. However I do think you'll usually find better options with ASUS or DFI.
 
For whatever reason, when you click on recommended motherboards on the AMD website, you can see many Gigabyte boards while Asus, Abit etc will have a shorter list.
That's odd to me, but it gives you the impression that Gigabyte makes solid boards.
 
The last 3 mobos I've used were gigabyte, one on a 478 system, one on a 775 system, and one on a 754 AMD system.

2 of them were replaced by ASUS boards soon after, if that tells you anything. They aren't near as feature rich, overclockable, or stable compared to a good ASUS board.
 
Personally I am an Abit fan, though I also like MSI and DFI as well. I always consider all 3 when looking for Mobo's, but I really don't ever consider Asus or Giga-Byte.... And one thing I would pretty much NEVER do is tell a friend to consider Asus or Giga-Byte.

The reason I don't recommend Asus and Giga-Byte is because they have way to many motherboards of VERY different quality and feature levels. Sure, we in the enthusiast community generally look at them and say "They have some rocking boards, I will consider buying one just as I consider Abit, MSI, and DFI.", but then we look ONLY at their top 2 or 3 boards and don't even consider anything lesser from them. Meanwhile if I were to tell a friend to look at their boards, and he didn't know nearly as much as me, then he might by one of their el-cheapo boards.... Then I would probably be spending every other saturday at his house fixing all the problems with it. :(

So my point is that that if I suggest ABIT, MSI, or DFI, all companies that build basically only true quality boards (Yeah, MSI does have a few slightly lower range boards, but it's a very small percentage and they are still way better than Asus's worst), then my friend will end up with a motherboard that I will be able to rely on not to screw up constantly, and my weekends will be free to blow the crap out of my friend in Unreal Tournament or BF2 or something instead of slaving away fixing his crappy PC.
 
I build with about 4-5 brands constantly depending. I never recommend DFI to anyone that does not understand memory latencies and voltages and clocks and dividers ratios are willing to get a premium power supply (this is a good idea for any system really just to thwart of any potential problems). I have no problem with Gigabyte at all. In fact i plan to base my next system on one along with a 7800 (unless i go with a PCIe S754 board and for the 3400+ newcastle i currently have).It will be Gigabyte or Albatron. I like the new Albatron SLI mobo because it's smaller (about the same size as an ecs 755a2 with only two rows of standoffs) yet has very nice spacing with the PCIe slots - and a cross town shop says it run the 4400X2 nicely with the bios that is shipping now and is a stable mobo, and runs sli very nicely.
 
I can't speak for everybody, but one thing that annoys the living crap out of me about Gigabyte is their tech support.

Late last week, Gigabyte released the F10 BIOS for the K8NSNXP-939 (adds X2 support). I contacted Gigabyte to let them know that there was some major problems with it. Myself and a friend who have this board couldn't even boot into Windows with the F10 BIOS. To me, it looked almost like they mixed up the microcode for the older Athlon processors (Newcastle and earlier) with the one for the Venice core based chips. Long story short, my system would intermittently fail at POST with a memory error after flashing with the F10 BIOS. When it would boot, it would take about FIVE MINUTES to boot WinXP, but it would never make it to the desktop. When it wouldn't boot, I had to boot with one DIMM just to get back into the DualBIOS menu and recover the system.

Instead of actually READING what I sent them, they sent me a vaugely worded Engrish reply that attempted to lay the blame of the problems squarely back on my chest. Yeah, right. I've been working with computers for almost 17 years now. I think I have a general clue what I'm doing by now. ;)

It's been less than a week, and miracle upon miracles, Gigabyte just released the F11 BIOS today. Guess what it fixes (hint: the description says :CPU Microcode update). Just flashed with it and it works great.

Funny, wouldn't you say?

This isn't the first time I've contacted them about issues and they've given me the attitude that it's all my fault (or a particular bug is really a feature). For example, when the K8NSNXP-939 (w/F3 BIOS) first came out, the IDE LED wouldn't work with any HD's attached to the nvidia SATA controller. When I contacted them, they told me THAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THAT WAY. Fast forward to the F5 BIOS and the LED suddenly started working. Not a major issue really, but I don't particularly like being lied to.

In short, I really like Gigabyte motherboards, but their tech support people need to take a few lessons in customer service. If Gigabyte releases a board like the Asus A8N-SLi Premium, I may consider it if the price is about the same. After this last experience though, I'm thinking I just might get the Asus board instead. I've owned an Asus P2B, P3B-F, P4P-800, and an A7N8X DLX (four of them), and NOT ONCE did they screw up the BIOS like Gigabyte has.
 
I have replaced a number of Gigapoop boards due to all kinds of failures. More than with Asus motherboards and Asus outsells them by alot. We've also had tons of returns on them. Personally you'd have to give it to me for free or pay me to use one.

Gigabyte also makes some proprietary motherboard features that aren't worth a shit and don't work right anyway. Like thier BS AGP Power plug. WTF is that crap?!?!? I've seen many people hook that up when the manual tells you not to do so and the boards have fried from it. Gigabyte should never have deviated from the standard with that plug in the first place.

Just a couple reasons I hate them. I rank their quality as slightly better than ECS or PC-Chips but thats about it.
 
Pfft. I find the engrish amusing :)


I was impressed with asus and abit when I was building athlon xp systems ( built lots of the a7n8x (ultra/non ultra) and nf7 rigs for people.


Hmm, I dunno. I guess I just don't follow brand name's around in motherboard technology when generations change. Originally I had purchased an epox 9ndaj+ for my first A64 build because it was cheap....and when I couldnt get it working (powersupply issue) I ordered this gigabyte board because of its features...and its worked fantastic so far, especially as it relates to overclocking this venice chip.

Admitedly I don't have THAT much experiance with other mobo's in the A64 realm yet (built an MSI neo4 plat setup for someone a few weeks ago and i'm damn glad it isnt mine) ....but for all the smack people seem to talk about it I really have a hard time believing that just by swapping my mobo out i'm going to get some astoundingly different results for the setup I am currently using.


Owell. I guess if I can get this board stable at 3000mhz some of you will be believers eh :)
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
I have replaced a number of Gigapoop boards due to all kinds of failures. More than with Asus motherboards and Asus outsells them by alot. We've also had tons of returns on them. Personally you'd have to give it to me for free or pay me to use one.

Gigabyte also makes some proprietary motherboard features that aren't worth a shit and don't work right anyway. Like thier BS AGP Power plug. WTF is that crap?!?!? I've seen many people hook that up when the manual tells you not to do so and the boards have fried from it. Gigabyte should never have deviated from the standard with that plug in the first place.

Just a couple reasons I hate them. I rank their quality as slightly better than ECS or PC-Chips but thats about it.
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So it's not the board, but the incompetent user that caused most of the Returns. Maybe if they Read the F'in Manual.


And to slap them in the face and put them as slightly better than Pc-chips or ECS. LOL I find that laughable. Sounds like your just jaded.
 
Mindriot said:
So it's not the board, but the incompetent user that caused most of the Returns. Maybe if they Read the F'in Manual.


And to slap them in the face and put them as slightly better than Pc-chips or ECS. LOL I find that laughable. Sounds like your just jaded.
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You forgot the point that ASUS outsells Gigabyte but gets much fewer returns. I've worked at my job for about a month and I've probably had to replace about 10 Gigabyte boards. No other brand, not even fucking Winfast, has seen that many returns in such a short timeframe.

I also got to mess with a Gigabyte board. My boss's. It couldn't even do an HTT of 250 for chrissakes.

Durron said:
I'd take a gigabyte board of a POS asus or dfi any day
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For sure. Proven quality sucks, doesn't it?
 
Gigabyte puts out some boards that suck real bad and have a lot of problems. Gigabyte will ocasionally make a very good motherboard as well, they are a mixed bag.
 
Mindriot said:
So it's not the board, but the incompetent user that caused most of the Returns. Maybe if they Read the F'in Manual.


And to slap them in the face and put them as slightly better than Pc-chips or ECS. LOL I find that laughable. Sounds like your just jaded.
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No, the point is that a board shouldn't be that cryptic. That issue is the perfect sign of a poorly designed board.

As far as I'm concerned, until gigabyte becomes good at ANY particular area (overclocking, stability, longevity, price, etc) then they are useless to me. Why should I get them if they are not one of the best in ANY area? If I want overclocking, I get DFI or Abit. If I want stability I get Asus or MSI. If I want cheap I get ECS or Epox. Where does this leave Gigabyte for me? Nowhere. Hell, as far as I'm concerned ECS ranks higher in my book than gigabyte, because at least they're good at SOMETHING--price.
 
I can't really speak for their boards right now, but we used to use primarily Gigabyte in all of our consumer based systems.

Then the GA-7DX came out. It was the first motherboard to support the Athlon and DDR (well except for the FIC board, but that's FIC so it doesn't really count :D )

We sold a ton of those boards, both as mobo/cpu combos and in systems. Then we started having all kinds of problems with the boards flaking out or just going tits up. Which in and off itself isn't all that bad, all manufacturer's have their share...although this was over the course of several months so it wasn't a bad batch.

We as a reseller, with an account with Gigabyte would try to get RMAs taken care of, we would either get the same bad board back, or we would get a run around about the board is still being looked at. It was a disaster, I had to cover/replace motherboards for customers because gigabyte was horrible at service. We would call and get completely different answers...sometimes in the same day.

One day, we had been given the run around pretty bad, and the person that owned the motherboard was getting kind of pissy, so I called up gigabyte and was kind of dishing it out to the guy on the phone, and then he told me that I should take it easy on him because he just got moved to support from some other non-technical position because they had just gotten rid of everyone in the support dept.

We basically cut our loses, and never looked back. Like I said we had had no problems up till then, and even if the motherboards had issues, if Gigabyte would have stood behind their product we would have probably stuck with them...but I just can't bring myself to go back when their are so many other boards out there.

Hey, maybe they are getting better...at least thier R&D dept seems to be doing some cool things (RAM Drive, first dual GPU nvidia vid card)...maybe its a step in the right direction...but then again, great products are only truly great when they are backed by great support.
 
Mindriot said:
So it's not the board, but the incompetent user that caused most of the Returns. Maybe if they Read the F'in Manual.


And to slap them in the face and put them as slightly better than Pc-chips or ECS. LOL I find that laughable. Sounds like your just jaded.
Click to expand...

I sighted one example of things people keep doing to kill them. Specifically one Best Buy tech that used to be a salesman where I work.

What I don't like is their weird and completely useless features such as that power connector. I've yet to see it used for squat. Its useless and is confusing to people. That is why I don't like it.

As far as quality goes, I've seen all kinds of crap with thier boards. Such as failed voltage regualtors. One system was brought in because it didn't POST. I fired it up and I started seeing smoke come off the board. I turned it off and all kinds of crap had burned up around the south bridge.

I've just not had good experiences. Although I still replace more ECS and PC-Chips boards. That's what I meant to convey.
 
All the motherboard manuracturers are good until you got a bad experience. Search around the net and you'll find plenty other people complaining about ASUS, MSI, etc. Gigabyte didn't become a major mobo maker and lasted this long for being a bad manufacturer. To me, Gigabyte is well-balanced in almost all the aspects. Therefore, I can imagine people who prefer well-roundedness would want to purchase one. Plus, they have always been the one to pack a few more features than others on the mobos. So there is another area for ya.
 
lifesboring said:
All the motherboard manuracturers are good until you got a bad experience. Search around the net and you'll find plenty other people complaining about ASUS, MSI, etc. Gigabyte didn't become a major mobo maker and lasted this long for being a bad manufacturer. To me, Gigabyte is well-balanced in almost all the aspects. Therefore, I can imagine people who prefer well-roundedness would want to purchase one. Plus, they have always been the one to pack a few more features than others on the mobos. So there is another area for ya.
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If by well rounded, you mean suck at everything equally, then I agree with you. I have to deal with these things every day I work and I just loathe them. The only one they seem to have gotten right was the K8NS-U. The 939 nForce3 board they make that actually doesn't get returned!
 
Aaron_ATX said:
Did gigabyte tease you as a kid?

Did gigabyte knock up your sister?

Did gigabyte steal your television?
Click to expand...

Yes.

That and every one of their products I've come in contact with was incapable of reliable performance at stock settings.
 
robberbaron said:
If by well rounded, you mean suck at everything equally, then I agree with you. I have to deal with these things every day I work and I just loathe them. The only one they seem to have gotten right was the K8NS-U. The 939 nForce3 board they make that actually doesn't get returned!
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I guess I got lucky when I made this purchase then :).
 
Couple reasons why I hate Gigabyte:
1) Their Auto Update Bios bs, flashed my board to the wrong version, I didnt know this until much later but it screwed with my memory settings and I was frequent to BSODs at any random time. Even after adjusting memory settings, I still got bsods.
2) Their website, no matter where I viewed it from be it here at home on any PC, or at my school...I would find myself sorting through Chinese or Arabic.
3) After waiting several weeks for their website to get to work in English, and responding to several surveys about how crappy their website is, everytime I attempted to download the correct bios version...english mind you...the download would not start. I'd have to click on Asia or some place in order to get the download...even then that was iffy if it downloaded.
4) Their Tech support needs to take 10 years of English, I can't understand what their saying and obviously they can't understand what Im saying.
5) I've gone through two boards, first one can't remember what the problem was but I called them to get RMA, they told me to contact the vendor and recommended I try Kingston ram in my board...which luck would have it I was using.

I've swapped out for an Abit board and NOT A SINGLE PROBLEM. Gigabyte is crap..
 
Flak Monkey said:
I guess I got lucky when I made this purchase then :).
Click to expand...


Actually, yeah. That's a pretty good board, on par with MSI's.
hity645 said:
I've swapped out for an Abit board and NOT A SINGLE PROBLEM. Gigabyte is crap..
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Abit has always made nice boards, so it's not fair to compare them to Gigacrap ;)
 
Abit has themselves been guilty of a few lapses. Not much to talk about since the NF7_S really (and AN7). The Fatal1ty boards are ok but overpriced imo and not that good.
 
Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI all make good boards. Sometimes they make bad boards though and people get really bent out of shape about it. A lot of review sites write articles using the Asus A8N-SLI but I've heard that the board is buggy and unstable. I know people that will never buy MSI boards. Before the Lan Party series no one know what DFI was. Does that mean they are the best or the worst? Come on, like the previous post says, they can't make all there boards bad.

Gigabyte makes some nice low end boards, mid-range, and high end boards. Name another manufacturer that has dual bios, 1394B, and power DPS things. At least they try to put something new or unique on their boards. I don't know about there support because although I've built alot of systems using their boards I've never had to talk to support.

Plus, Gigabyte has a nice website. I really hate having to go to some other mobo makers website for drivers.
 
Gigabyte workstation motherboards: nice.

Gigabyte consumer boards: meh?
 
I got 2 gigabyte mobo, they have been great, nothing is wrong with them and some of the features are pretty good like easy tuner 5.
 
Iv'e buit at least 10 Gigabyte boards in the past 2 years and they have all been execellant.
They dont overclock real high but thet are stable and reliable. I have not had any problems the ones i built and they are used daily for business applications. I have built Gigabyte, Chaintech,Soltek,and MSI and they have all worked execellant.
 
evenglow said:
Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI all make good boards. Sometimes they make bad boards though and people get really bent out of shape about it. A lot of review sites write articles using the Asus A8N-SLI but I've heard that the board is buggy and unstable. I know people that will never buy MSI boards. Before the Lan Party series no one know what DFI was. Does that mean they are the best or the worst? Come on, like the previous post says, they can't make all there boards bad.

Gigabyte makes some nice low end boards, mid-range, and high end boards. Name another manufacturer that has dual bios, 1394B, and power DPS things. At least they try to put something new or unique on their boards. I don't know about there support because although I've built alot of systems using their boards I've never had to talk to support.

Plus, Gigabyte has a nice website. I really hate having to go to some other mobo makers website for drivers.
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I remember DFI from the Pentium 1 and Cyrix 6x86 days. Back then they were total junk. Personally, I think Gigabyte's website blows goats.

Yes every company makes mistakes. Gigabyte is just better at making mistakes than the others. :D
 
My experience is a little different from the others... I've only owned Gigabyte and Abit boards thus far.

Abit has been nothing but trouble for me. I started out with an Abit BP6, which is famous for it's problems. Later I had an Abit IC7-MAX2 which I RMA'd twice and just gave up. The first IC7 would randomly reboot and eventually just stopped booting. The second didn't work from the get go. When I contacted Abit to let them know, they gave me the run around.

Gigabyte is my primary board. They had been flawless for me up until my GA-8KNXP, which does all sorts of funny things with PCI cards (some just don't work, but if i take them out others don't work). I contacted Gigabyte support who gave me the run around for 3 weeks then just stopped responding. It took about 6 emails back and forth before they understood what was really going on, even though I felt it was clearly outlined. About 4 months later they got back to me... with more run around! I gave up, and have learned to live with it. I did buy a GA-8IPE1000 Pro-G a few months later for a friend and it's been solid as a rock. The support experience was enough however to turn me off to Gigabye completely.

I'm now building an Asus A8N-SLI system. We'll see how that goes.
 
I haven't built many sytems so my opinion dosen't count for much, but Ive never had a problem with Gigabyte boards being flaky. My overclocking needs just outgrew what they offered. Winfast on the other hand makes some really crappy boards
 
2 years back i had a gigabyte socket 478 848P lite motherboard. it was DOA wouldnt even boot. i rma'd it. never came back. gigabyte never answerd my emails or phonecalls,
 
One of the reasons you will find gigabyte boards along side pc chips, epox and the like at your local computer store is because they have a low cost point and higher resell pricing.
which is good for the shop owner. These boards also rate very very average. Just google "gigabyte review" and see for yourself.


MSI, I always have a ton of DOA boards .. never will use again

Gigabyte, very lack luster and average

Abit, always good performance and features

Asus, quality and performance, love them

Shuttle had some good boards 4 - 5 years ago, they are off the radar now

just personal opinions of course
 
Everyone tends to have a different opinion. For me, it's ASUS and DFI (although I haven't used them before) for best perfomance vs stability vs price, MSI for stability and price, and Gigabyte for decent motherboards. They aren't in the same league as the ASUS for sure, as their "performance models" aren't that great, but their consumer stuff is pretty decent. O and their video cards are pretty good as well, the Voodoo Banshee in my old comp is a Gigabyte and it performs solidly.

But yeah Gigabyte and performance? Sorry, not at all.
 
I had a Gigabyte 8KNXP. It was an awesome feature rich Intel 875PE board. It eventually died on me and I've replaced it with several boards since. Gigabytes are solid feature full boards, but they're not as easy or fun to OC than some others.

I may go back someday. There isn't a single best board maker out there.

However, I believe that OCing really depends upon your chipset more than the mobo (once you're in the high end of things).

This Intel 925X chipset absolutely stinks for OCing.
 
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