On Monday 03 January 2005 21:08, Jeff Vian wrote: > I used to use ASUS boards and had no problems (back when it was a > circuit board and no onboard controllers). I have not used one for more > than 4 years now, and don't miss it at all. A lot has changed since then and these days all name brand manufacturers (and most others) are capable of producing good quality boards - In the end that means that you have to look at each model sparately and there is no company that always has "the best"... There are many other things though you can use to distinguish between the boards... Asus is known for their well rounded retail packages. Abit for cutting edge and so on... Another area to look at is how the manufacturer supports Linux. That's the reason why I switched to MSI - They have swapped boards for me with problems like "Runs windows fine but Linux is unstable"... Also, be careful with reports of which boards break often and so on... One thing I've figured out is that boards act diferently to different types of stress. Asus board i.e. are usually very breakable when it comes to bending them. MSI boards in my experience are much more suseptable to death by static electricity. I personally prefer MSI - they don't have the latest and greatest features but they run stable for me and as I said, their tech support and return department never gave me any issues... But then again, I've heard bad things about them as well. They have no Linux driver downloads (although lately their webpage shows "all windows" next to the downloads, so maybe that will change soon) and their bios updater docs are M$ word... Peter.
