Gigabyte - Turning out junk now?

M

MrSmith

Geek Trainee
First of all, this is my first post so I would like to say hello.

Now for my short story:

I recently purchased about $1600 worth of hardware from NewEgg to build myself a new system.

I have been building PC's since 486 / 33 's were the fastest thing around.

For a Mobo (based on AMD's Socket AM2) I went with Gigabyte's new GA-M55SLI-S4 and have used Gigabyte boards for many years without many RMA's.

Built:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
2 Gigs (2 X 1 MB stick) G-Skill DDR2 PC533
EVGA GeForce 7600GT PCI Express X16
Seagate 320 GB SATA 3.0
SoundBlaster Audigy 2
Aspire X-Dreamer case

First thing I noticed during burn in was the Northbridge heatsink was HOT!

I mean could burn you if you touched it!

I ordered a Thermaltake Heatpipe Chipset cooler (Bi-Directional) and cooled it down to 56 C under load.

Ran a bunch of various Benchmarks without seeing much that excited me.

Went ahead and loaded my business and games onto it and it lasted a week.

Shut it down one night, booted to no video, no post, nothing but the fans turning in the case.

Removed hardware by hardware until I was down to just the Mobo and still no post.

I RMA'ed it to NewEgg and received another (Same board).

Guess what!? Yup, same issue a week later.

Boots to no video, no post, no beeps, no screams, nothing!!!

I jumped on NewEgg and started reading the newest reveiws on this board.

It seems a lot of others are having the same issues.

I put in for a refund RMA today and ran to a local PC store and bought an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe "Wireless Edition".

At the first fresh boot into Windows Xp I could see the difference!

This thing is running like lightning and now I couldn't be happier!

All temps are down by about 8-10 C at load.

The ASUS board has a nice HeatPipe Chipset / Northbridge cooler and it even came with an optional fan (Which it should have for $250!).

So I am wondering, anyone else here having / had / heard of similiar issues with Gigabyte boards?

Any comments or advice on fine tuning my new PC would be appreciated and welcome!

Thanks!
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funny you should mention that, 'cause asus and gigabyte have merged

gigabyte website was extreamly slow, now asus has started to slowdown also (same server?), is this the beginning of a slower future!!! :confused:
 
When a fairly new motherboard is released it can take a while to work out issues with chipset drivers etc. But at least you have a nice working computer now with that Asus board.

[ot]newpaws - just because the website was slow doesn't mean the products will be.

Maybe the website was experiencing a lot of visitors / traffic.[/ot]
 
Did Gigabyte and Asus really merge?!

Thanks for the positive comment.

Once I get an aftermarket CPU cooler I'll try some overclocking and see if I can fry everything! LOL! :chk:
 
I don't think Gigabyte has gone downhill. Like it or not, a bad board slips by quality control, no matter how good it is. I doubt it's because of the Asus/Gigabyte collaborative effort. (it's not a merger, but they're working together)

No offense, but it seems rather silly to flip out the one time you have a problem with a company that's been smooth sailing for you on multiple occasions.

Also, consider that you may have done something incorrectly. It happens to the best of us, and given Gigabyte's good reputation and the inconvience of swapping out the motherboard, it wouldn't hurt to re-check your connections and settings. Also, you may want to check for a BIOS update or even beta BIOS releases that address some stability issues.
 
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