You have been though a lot with those motherboards I hope whatever you use end up working well.

Well I am finally over it now for a few days but one thing it did is it ended me with Gigabyte boards for a while and you know I have no use for Asus any more either so it looks like I'll be all MSI for a while.

Well nothing wrong with MSI you know I use a lot of them - they are usually more stable than others because they tend to stick to more basic configs, have better layouts, a more user friendly bios etc. I was also a dedicated Gigabyte user Rich for so long, starting around 2000-2006. They started trying to trick boards up too much at times like Asus I think to compete with them. Tricking boards up can become a problem -- depending. It's funny how the motherboard scene has now ended up with there only being a few that have survived when there were so many choices years pervious. MSI's issues a few years ago were where they advertised boards as "OC" boards when they didn't even have the power phasing to be "OC boards". They have corrected that for the most part and now offer some of the best boards. MSI customer service also has a very drastic turnaround with how they handle customers they do a pretty good job now. Asus is still very very good but the quality has gone down a tad, customer service isn't what it was before. So nowadays, basically the 3 main board makers are pretty even with MSI coming up, Asus going down a bit, and Gigabyte so very slightly going down as well. That said all three offer some great choices according to budget. I still use MSI more than others but have again dipped into Gigabyte with the Z97 SLI board which is a terrific board, with the only caveat being the bios. It basically has 3 modules to it (as you are aware) with the main 1st boot being an awful Windows Metro looking selection screen. None of the modules are intuitive other than the "classic" bios mode -- even then I noticed on ALL gigabyte new bios the mouse is very slow and classic mode with the keyboard is the only way to move swiftly in the bios vs. MSI's very well designed bios easy to use mouse works great in it. Other than that the Gigabyte SLI Z97 I like very much.

Nice one Catch, if I can ever afford an intel system I may get that board good info. About Solid State Drives... i hear SSD is so quiet because less moving parts? I don't have one yet I can't afford it just yet but soon I think I saw a nice price posted in the deals section here. It will be nice when we can get the same hard drive capacity for the same prices as current regular hard drives. I will be buying he FX 6300 soon so I will keep you posted when that happens, hopefully sooner than later.

Right Catch I am not complaining, I learned on all MSI boards when it was the standard for most of the shops I went to or worked in. I think all the top makers have had their ups and downs but I haven't had any Gigabyte boards go bad for quite a while. Asus for me has always been spotty and I have stayed away the last few years.

Msi has a really great range of boards now its just that normally when you see a consolidation down to only a few makers they are all good. I have never had a bad Biostar board and they are still around and I have had good success with AS Rock since they have been making their own, I forgot about that one.

I used an AS Rock board on Sam C's rebuild. It was the first UEFI board I ever worked with.

 

(ASRock 870iCafe)

I actually have a fair amount of systems out there with AS Rock boards in them. I think they are real solid. The one I miss is EVGA, those were great quality boards with nice extra touches like heat shields for ram and nice cases for the sata cords. The boxes were sealed in plastic and the static bags were also. Epox did the same type of thing. I also thought the EVGA boards were thicker but I am not sure what that did for them. I just noticed an EVGA board for 1150 socket and its the only one that goes up to 2600 ram speed without oc necessary. It really bothers me that every other Asus, Gigabyte and Msi board speeds over 1600 Ddr3 must be oc to obtain in 1150. One of the reasons I picked the MSI board I am on is it was one of the few FM2 boards again that could run over 1600 speed ram without OC and I was stuck with 2133 ram I had bought for Gigabyte 1150 board which croaked before the ram even arrived. This has been a big month for me in hardware decision making for the future as almost everything I had faith in died. It reminds me of the sulking period I was in when Acronis died for me after mutilating 2 systems. I felt like I had lost my "lifeline".

I remember eVGA mostly for overclockers, most of the design was intended with overclocking in mind. I installed more than a few 780i boards myself but in that era I stuck to Gigabye mostly. Before that I used Soyo at times, and some Epox Nforce 2 mobos (8RDA+) along with Biostar M7NCDP.

Good one I forgot about Soyo I had one of my best systems with one of those boards.

Yeah the old Soyo AMD KT 266A Dragon Plus I used that one for a long time but later I also built with KT333 and KT400 Soyo mobos. The KT266a Dragon Plus was the defacto standard high end AMD board until Nforce 2 series came along, and for some reason I think Soyo had a deal specifically with VIA and didn't produce a single nforce2 board, which really hurt them. Later they did finally make an Nforce3 board but by that time it was way too late most AMD folks had moved to Asus, Abit, Epox, Shuttle, Biostar and others.

Right Abit was another good maker and I had quite a few good ones of those as well.

My great board from them was the NF7-S. What a monster overclocker that board was.

BTW many thanks I looked in Programs and Features on the Dell and found all kinds of Intel programs and uninstalled them all except for video driver and sound and also disabled Turbo Boost in the bios and this thing boots much faster and runs faster. I have had only one freeze since doing all that 3-4 days ago,

No problem Rich I am glad your system is more stable.

I may have spoken too soon...all of a sudden I am having video driver issues and am starting to question R7 card...I know somewhere Catch you were planning to buy this one or the R9 and I would hold up. I am getting the occasional video driver stalled or quit type error or recovered from error and last night it happened 10 times in a row so this AM I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver which we both know probably will do nothing. I looked to see if there are any Omega drivers for ATi cards but they don't work with this new series. I am also having audio sound issues and am thinking of moving my video card to the bottom Pci-x slot so I can put my Creative card in the pci-x slot underneath the video card which right now is uselessly blocked. I may do that later this AM because the sound was also going in and out last night on me trying to listen to some music.

I had already ordered the R9 290x but I installed it in a customers system who ordered a very high end system. I had no issues during testing though as I mentioned before about the HIS model it's much better cooled than the rest from what I could see with a massive very high quality heatsink. I think that had a lot to do with it since the issues seems to stem from VRAM cooling. Regarding your card I will take that into consideration as I was about to order +3 R7 265 models, though I head they are unaffected since they are an HD 7850 rehash. I have heard of many issues with the newer AMD cards save the R7 260-265 and R9 270X as those are all rehashed. Did you by chance have another system to test that card in?

I could try it in another system sure but so far after 1 day the issues seem to have gone away since I uninstalled everything with Revo and reinstalled with the original driver. It may have been the newer one. I seem to remember when I did the install seeing that the Catalyst driver said it could not work with Windows 7 or my system (memory is foggy)...then I remember seeing a beta for the Catayst and doing it. When I went to uninstall I saw no evidence of any difference in Programs and Features so if my memory was right then the new install did replace the one with issues. It seems to me the driver I used though was the same as original and I did not see failure of catalyst to install this time. That was a very hectic period for me as everything was failing when I built this system so I don't know if my memory here is correct or not but as I said so far in 1 day I have yet to see that display failure yet it is way too soon to judge. The day I had the 10 failures in a row the pc had heavy use and was on all day.