worlds most flakey mo-bo's

JSF35rhino

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 25, 2005
Messages
1,253
worst all time motherboards you've had to deal with , old or new please be as specific as you can about make, model and chipest . . so please don't just post- maker such and such sucks . and DOA's don't count .

it has to work just long enough to drive you crazy--LOL

# 1 i remember an obscure MB for the pentium 2 called
"kimpo" it had a via such and such chipset as i recall --back in the 66 fsb day. i got a batch of them--every one of them was super flakey re-booters many hours wasted trying to get up to just run--

# 2 another not quite stable MB/cpu

PMQ or PQM ?? (? i think) althon with the 751 irongate chipset and a a 500cpu and sdram 168 pin

i remember trying cheap ram- to expensive mushkin- several diffrent psu"s all the way up to a staggering 300w powerhouse-(yea way back then) and it was still crash prone--yea it was running win 98/ 98 se --this was my first big $$$ system
--but it was a dissipointment -wouldn't overclock much and had stability problems my old cheap sis/k6 wasn't as fast but it didn't crash (much)--LOL--this was supposed to be their big comback MB-- bought it of reviews on the net talking about how stable it was-- (reviews don't lie ?)

# 3 Epox with via 333ce chipset -- well after having great results from the epox/AMD 761 setup i thought i would get the newer board with the then new via 333ce chipset --thinking i was going to overclock the t-breads--well this was the leading edge of the bad-caps

out of a batch of 10--all had severe problems one of them even melted the cpu socket ! 5 jillion calls to epox and a million run arounds several bios updates-ram changes ect--notheing worked --my jobber had to eat some of them as well as myself--the whole deal kind of soured me on epox i haven't bought a thing epox since. hopefully their better now i've had a few batches of bad mb's since--but nothing like a 10 out of 10 flakeys back to back .
 
In the 20+ years I would have to say anything that PC Chips makes, hands down. Whether K5/K6/K7 or P1/P2/P3/P4, they have the absolute worst record in my book.
 
AceGoober said:
In the 20+ years I would have to say anything that PC Chips makes, hands down. Whether K5/K6/K7 or P1/P2/P3/P4, they have the absolute worst record in my book.

Seconded. I had one of their slot-based Athlon boards in a PC I got from eBay. It was my second PC I had ever gotten in my whole life, and being that I was young, stupid, and 16 at the time, I didn't pay attention to stupid stuff like motherboard manufacturer and RAM speeds. I was just concerned with that nice 800MHz, 512MB of RAM number.

That piece of crap just crashed every chance it got. The RAM that was in it was litterally two sticks of RAM interconnected somehow so that it was a double-height RAM stick (it's really hard to describe it without having a picture). Sound on it crackled like a mother fucker, drivers were awful.
 
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (s939 nForce3 Ultra). I have this board, and I know 4 other people who have the exact same issues as I do. The board runs great and fast, but getting it to run without blue screens or random reboots takes lots of time and patience :cool:
 
I had endless problems with a hand-me-down ECS Socket-A motherboard, the voltage regulators eventually died on it. The person that gave it to me went ahead and bought another ECS board (against my recommendation) and had the capacitors pop on that one within 2 months of buying it.

Another friend had an ECS board would randomly "forget" about some of its RAM banks; he had three 128MB Mushkin Rev.2 PC133 sticks in it, but it would occasionaly report 128MB or 256MB when POSTing. This board was far from stable as well and it eventually stopped working altogether (dead northbridge I think).
 
bistars have a design fault ! and yet still they manufacutered and SOLD these items ! i hope ppl stop buyin them damm multi coloured lego mboards
 
ever hear of matsonic ? or is it masonic ?-

i got one of their mb's off ebay a few years ago for $5 with a celeron 400- it was a slot 1 and socket 370 with another via chipset seems like it was a 133a /623 or something like that .

well anyway the MB was like 10 years old when i got it --and as far as i know it still works but stability--well don't ask -- it would allmost run win 98se stable when running a 66fsb celery .

but the key word is "allmost" anyway after wasteing hours trying to get the thing stable --i found myself trying to burn it out--lol

some where that thing is still out there--half-working , and i bet whoever got it is thinking--well the thing is just old--but i bet it was that way brand new--lol :eek: :cool:
 
InYearsToCome said:
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (s939 nForce3 Ultra). I have this board, and I know 4 other people who have the exact same issues as I do. The board runs great and fast, but getting it to run without blue screens or random reboots takes lots of time and patience :cool:

really now? Ive had it for about 3 days and it hasn't blue screened or rebooted on me once.
 
Abit KT7A-Raid - worst POS MB ever.

I hated it.

My current MB MSI Neo Platinum v1.0 has issues too. It's slowly dieing on me.

First LAN died.
Then Firewire died.
Audio sucked from the get go (Soundstorm POS).
 
Several years ago, the IT director I was mentoring under was a TigerDirect groupie, and they came with early Tyan mobos with Cyrix MII processors. CHRIST. Getting the video and sound and other onboard fecal matter working was a pain like no other. The drivers rarely worked with 98 or 98se, and once they released newer drivers, they took down the links to their older ones, such as NT Workstation, one of the most common workstation OSes at the time.

Fortunately they changed their act later, but those damn SiS cds will haunt me till the end of my days.
 
Iwill KA266R

(BTW Im typing from an Abit KR7A w\ a VIA KT266A :p )
 
OEM board made by MSI for gateway (socketA). worst POS ive ever used.
MSI K8N neo2. fucking hate this thing.

NEVER buying MSI again. the only MSI board i like is my pro266td master-LR, and its been through 2 RMA's already
rolleyes.gif
 
ecs is definately the worst



LordBritish said:
Abit KT7A-Raid - worst POS MB ever.

Chickenleader said:
Any Abit had about 3 of them all were crap.

you guys are nuts. i think the kt7a is one of the best boards to date. i used one till last year, never had a problem and it clocked like a mofo. it started with a tbird 600 and ended up with a xp-1800 i beleve. ive never seen a board take so much abuse and keep going... i would never consider anything but abit for true stability
 
remember the old ibm's with the microbus...micro slots...whatever, back in the days of the 286. i feel a hundred years old...........
 
All ppl i know with an Asus board, ends up with a dead mainboard or a toasted nic/soundcard....

oldmx
 
InYearsToCome said:
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (s939 nForce3 Ultra). I have this board, and I know 4 other people who have the exact same issues as I do. The board runs great and fast, but getting it to run without blue screens or random reboots takes lots of time and patience :cool:

i NEVER have blue screens, not a single one on this board, when it boots its stable as a rock...

it has some "cold boot" issues i think they are called, im CERTAIN its an issue with the ram voltage on boot
 
PC Chips + ECS + Amptron = CRAP ( I am trying to be civil :p )

As for Abit, there is a price to pay to have all those crazy BIOS options...and sometimes that price is your sanity...I can remember sitting in threads with tons of people with problem after problem, all of us praying for that next beta BIOS that might fix our problems.
 
Worst board, and this may be a surprise: ASUS A7V8X-X, some websites regarded it as one of the best ever KT400 boards ever made, but mine started acting flakey after 7 months (thought it was the memory - it wasnt) and the thing died after 10 months taking the XP2000 CPU with it, no overclocking. A very fustrating expeirance after reading all that (hype) that ASUS made the best boards.

Replaced it with a Abit KD7-Raid and it's still working fine as my backup PC with a XP2400 after 2 years.

And I have a Abit KT7-Raid board that I bought five years ago still pumping away with a Athlon 1200 as the family office PC. The chipfan started slowing down a couple years ago but it was easily replaced with a Vantec Iceberq. I checked the capicitors last year and no leaks or bulging tops..I must have gotten one of the good ones..
 
in regards to MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum:
Peach said:
really now? Ive had it for about 3 days and it hasn't blue screened or rebooted on me once.

0Mega said:
i NEVER have blue screens, not a single one on this board, when it boots its stable as a rock...
it has some "cold boot" issues i think they are called, im CERTAIN its an issue with the ram voltage on boot

Mine worked very well for about 3 or so months, and then I had RAM issues galore (slots 1&2 resulted in constant blue screens, slots 3&4 seemed to work ok). I also started having SATA issues (black screens), forcing me to run on the SATA RAID slots, which in turn started acting up, and mysteriously the normal SATA slots were fixed... my friends experienced similar problems and we troubleshot together.

I'm not accusing all of these boards of being bad--they get great reviews. Just calling them very quirky, and it took a good bit of voltage adjustment to get them running stably in the long run. as of now I'm 2 months without a single lockup-- i might have it right this time. (owned for about 11 months now)
 
humm i got a ECS a754 so far it's been stable even overclocked to 250fsb .


i suppose alll MB makers have had some problem children at one time or another. :cool:
 
ECS makes plenty of boards...plenty of them are not even labelled ECS, they are OEM'd off to the other big namebrand companies...

Ford Chevy Dodge..same ol shit argument...
 
PCChips SIS chipset was without a doubt is the worst board i've ever owned.

I've had an Abit board which gave me just a few problems but nothing major.

My Asus board is great. No problems whatsoever.
 
hardwarephreak said:
PC Chips + ECS + Amptron = CRAP ( I am trying to be civil :p )

As for Abit, there is a price to pay to have all those crazy BIOS options...and sometimes that price is your sanity...I can remember sitting in threads with tons of people with problem after problem, all of us praying for that next beta BIOS that might fix our problems.
Ahahaha....it all sounds so familiar. DFI, anyone? :p
 
yep-- i'll bet one day ther will only be one place in china making MB's --they will just run msi one day and abit the next --probably spend more money on the box and artwork that on the cap's and power mosfets ! !!--LOL :eek:
 
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, worst board ive ever had. Several components fail for no reason, seems MSI is starting to go downhill.
 
back in my p4 days via started making their own MB's --supposedly fabbricated by ASUS . having had fair luck at the time with the kt-266 asus -- i though i would try one for my 1.6a p4.

well lets say it was a less than happy attempt--LOL the thing would run solid--just long enough to make you think it was stable then start crashing -re-booting or freezing . overclocking ?--forget it-- after a month or two--and a bunch of diffrent tweeks and bios upgrades i finally decided to get a re-ferbed gigabyte titan 667 845PE which was actually a pretty good MB untill i killed it experimenting with a 2.4c northwood . (cross-flashed the bios in an attempt to get support for 200fsb)


the bad thing was the VIa should have been a great MB--had tons of features--it just couldn't run stable.
:eek:
 
Abit KT7 VIA KT-133 Chipset
Abit KT-7 RAID VIA KT-133 Chipset
Abit KT7-A VIA KT-133A Chipset
Abit KT7-A RAID VIA KT-133A Chipset

All of the above boards left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to Abit. It didn't help that I had issues with Abit BX-6 Rev 2 boards prior to that. General instability was the hall mark of these pieces of shit. Partly due to VIA drivers sucking hard at the time. However, I replaced those boards with a Asus A7V-133A and I never had a crash or lockup again out of that motherboard/CPU combo.

FIC VA-503+ is the absolute worst motherboard I ever had to deal with. And I dealt with alot of them. They are the suck. Bigtime. Horrid documentation that was absolutely wrong about the jumper settings, stability issues out the ass. Not sure what chipset it was other than it was a VIA chipset. I remember it was one of the first Super 7 boards for the AMD K6.

Soyo 6BA +100. The company I work for bought about 6 of these things one year. Out of that six all of them died in less than two years. Four of them died within the first year of owning them. The first one I took out of the box, was missing the tabs on the memory sockets. They weren't broken, they just hadn't been installed at all. Another one of them out of the box had a defective PCI slot, and all of them were unstable as hell. No matter what PSU's, cards or even memory I used. That was one shitty motherboard.

Replaced those same shitty Soyo's with Asus boards and never had any problems after that.

DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR is another one of the shittiest mobo's I've ever used in my life. Consistant memory compatibility issues, PSU compatibility issues and just general instability. Even at stock speeds. I've never had to do so many BIOS updates just to make the damn board workable out of the box. It was rediculous. After the customer got tired of us having to dick with the damn thing, he authorized the replacement of the board with an Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe. (He wasn't interested in overclocking) and all was well after that. The system was solid after that.

The Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe. While a fine board in it's own right I'd just like to point out that this piece of hardware is easily one of Asus's worst motherboards to date. The 1T/2T timing problems and memory compatiblity issues were just appaling. As was the choice of active chipset cooler for the northbridge that was just absolute shit. My chipset fan died in a month after purchasing the board, and several memory modules I've installed into A8N-SLi's do not get their SPD values detected properly. Which sucks. Manually configuring these settings does work, and they are very stable boards, but still. I find this board to rank near the bottom for Asus in general.

MSI Neo 2?!?!?! Whatever, I don't know all damn MSI models sound the same. They've all got the damned word "Neo" or "Neo2" whatever. It was the special edition black MSI 865PE chipset based board. It has tons of issues reading SPD information off memory modules and has a few other quirks. Not MSI's finest board for sure.
 
motherboards are fine, there is a small percentage of damaged boards that pass quality testing, i've never had issues with ANY motherboard using a clean power supply. when i was much younger i had issues with an asus p4p800 and a noname power supply (i must have been 15 or 16) and was running my p4 2.0 at 2.8 on the shittiest psu ever, eventually it killed my proc :D i've since stopped using anything but antec/thermaltake/etc...
 
my a8n sli deluxe has been pretty good --but i have allways used the beta bioses and have allways flashed the bios using the award flash (except for that one time--and that taught me a lesson--LOL)

my MB is a rev 1.0 one of the first out of the line . i have overclocked it ran sli --you name it-- only had two issues crop up #1 the dreaded T1 issue --well my MB will sometimes run @t1 above 260 with no problem--then one day it won't --then after weeks--it will run there again ?kind of a mystery thing .

the other issue was with the SLI --on some videocards--i would get a green line across the screen --others worked fine -WTF?--LOL luckly i had a few cards to swap around . i am however not a big fan of SLI--it is a feature looking for a problem to fix IMHO-

my northbridge HS& fan hasn't caused any problems so far--and this mb runs every day for 12-20 hours even on weekends (knock on wood) --i have had a few fans go out on asus videocards however-- :eek:

i haven't noticed any ram problems-- i have run bh-5s-ch-5s TCCD-TCCC, inferion and 1 gig sticks of generic high density that wasn't supposed to work and all run fine--(when their specs arn't exceeded too much)

i'm running 1013-02 beta --i will admit there were some crappy bioses for this mb--some of them were horrid.

DFI-ultra D's --well it is a chicken or -feather soup kind of deal-- iv'e built a number of them --a good one can run any kind of ram--use a avrage psu and still overclock like hell on wheels--

. BUT if you get a flakey one-- a 900w pc&p gold -plated PSU--special gold plated and blessed-by -dfi-street ram --along with all the DFI street advice and tips and 20,000 memory tweeks--still ain't going to run stable or overclock worth a damn.-- so i got mixed feelings about the DFI--a great MB when its right--but it can also make a ECS-nf4 look very, very good. i've got one and its great--but i hate to recommend them .
the irony is out of the three nf'4s i've been useing the only one i can really recommend is the ECS a-754-a939 --least problems and least $$--can't oc much--but so far stable-- :eek
i suppose if you don't expect too much for $50 it ain't such a pain as paying $150+ and have it go all flakey--: :eek:

back to abit

i've had good luck with abit's -- at one time they were one of my favorite brands--but that was when i was running intel my first abit was a socket 370 with a via chipset and my last was a ic7g with a 875p chipset very stable and overclockable .

however i admit that i went to intel because of all the problems people were having with abit and other MB's in via chipsets . i don't think any brand name is going to survive without making at least a few "flakeys" --a media darling today--sell-sell-sell--and RMA later--LOL
 
a good PSU is a must have--but a "good" PSU by itself ain't going to make a "flakey" mb--suddenly un-flakey.

case in point--on the matsonic via 266 slot 1/370mb -- i had a 450w antec sl on it for testing-

way, way more than required for the little matsonic/p2-266 cpu with 128mb of ram and one drive--

the 450sl antec is still running well in my a754 nf4 mb and hasn't missed a beat (knock on wood)-the darn'ed thing is so old i can't remember when i bought it--i think it was 1999?

although a flakey generic PSU --even in a fancy modular box, even if it claims MORE than enough amps & watts, even if you may have paid big $$$ and got a rebate --can make the best mb-cpu ram ect flakey as mom's apple pie crust !
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR is another one of the shittiest mobo's I've ever used in my life. Consistant memory compatibility issues, PSU compatibility issues and just general instability. Even at stock speeds. I've never had to do so many BIOS updates just to make the damn board workable out of the box. It was rediculous. After the customer got tired of us having to dick with the damn thing, he authorized the replacement of the board with an Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe. (He wasn't interested in overclocking) and all was well after that. The system was solid after that.

For current boards get's my vote.
 
computerpro3 said:
thirded. Never buying a dfi again.

Honestly, while I know DFI from the Pentium 1 days, and they were crap then, as a few other companies have been (including AMD) I wouldn't say never. Things could change and something could happen to make it a must have brand for a reason. Not this stupid !!!!!! cult fallowing they've acheived.

Just as once Abit was king and now is down with the rest of em, one day they could release some more must have hardware. One things for certain, the Fatal1ty crap has got to go.
 
What alot of people don't realise is there are so many damn options on the dfi's you need to/have the option of tweaking. Alot of people say they are unstable simply because they don't know what settings to change or they don't have the patience. I deffinately wouldn't include a dfi with any customer pc. Out of the following mobos:
Albatron kx18d pro (most stable mobo I have had, sadly a screwdriver killed it :-/)
Abit an7
Asus k8n deluxe
Dfi lp nf3 250
Biostar Ideq 200p sff mobo


I haven't had major issues with any =P
 
well i do alot of testing with my ultra d --i test ram PSU's and so forth .

as far as going in and setting all them "tweeky" ram settings--i hardly ever even bother--and i haven't seen any instability since the origional bios --618 beta seems to have worked wonders on this MB . i have seen unstable DFI's that had the gold-plated everything and hours and hours of memory tweeking and still flakey??

something is just wrong with that picture.


the DFI's seem to suffer from few things that i have seen over and over and over again in MB's .

a few reviews come out claiming how great they are and a number of them are sold -

more rave reviews come out--and the maker has to ramp up production to meet the suddenly much higher than supply demand-- then thats where things go to shit.--QC go down the shitter and there are no culls --and the should have been culled parts end up in the end users box--

i remember when msi did this with the kt266a i think it was--?? when the new amd socket comes out--just wait and see how long i hold out--LOL
 
InYearsToCome said:
in regards to MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum:




Mine worked very well for about 3 or so months, and then I had RAM issues galore (slots 1&2 resulted in constant blue screens, slots 3&4 seemed to work ok). I also started having SATA issues (black screens), forcing me to run on the SATA RAID slots, which in turn started acting up, and mysteriously the normal SATA slots were fixed... my friends experienced similar problems and we troubleshot together.

I'm not accusing all of these boards of being bad--they get great reviews. Just calling them very quirky, and it took a good bit of voltage adjustment to get them running stably in the long run. as of now I'm 2 months without a single lockup-- i might have it right this time. (owned for about 11 months now)

ive owned it for a LITTLE less than you (10 months) and it was my first bit of modern tech in a long while (coming from a celeron 533)

its rock stable as of late O_O not a single cold boot issue in close to a month running at 2.4 almost constantly but ive got it sitting at 1.8 at 1.4v and its no different, same stability as 2.4 so i think ill go back up there tonight lol

only setting i ever seem to change are ram and cpu related setting, 2.6v on the ram seems to be most stable...
 
What alot of people don't realise is there are so many damn options on the dfi's you need to/have the option of tweaking. Alot of people say they are unstable simply because they don't know what settings to change or they don't have the patience.

Oh, I realized it. And I gave it 2 RMA's, 1 late term paper, countless missed homework assignments, and close to 100 horus troubleshooting late. I was running a custom phase change / watercooled SLI system with a pc power and cooling 510 SLI power supply. I used nothing but premium parts. Yes, I overclocked these chips to the following speeds:

3200 winnie - 2.95ghz
3500 winnie - 3.0ghz
3500 clw - 3.17ghz
3700 sandy - 3.27ghz

and had one of the fastest computers on the entire forums (memory was running 272mhz 1.5-2-2-5 with tightest possible other memory settings with 1GB, 270mhz 2-2-2-5 2t with 2GB). I am not a noob. And the DFI boards are not stable enough for critical use in my opnion. I can not afford for my computer to go down at any time due to school. That is why I went ASUS. And it was a bonus that the ASUS overclocks better for me to. Hows 2.75ghz stable on air sound, 2.65 with stock volts? The DFI could only do 2.6ghz on air.
 
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