Really impressed with MSI

[dilpickle]

In the last 2 years I've gone thru all 4 major motherboard brands. (Not to mention everything from the last 20 years of PC building). And I gotta say MSI is easily the best for me right now.

 

I swore off Asus years ago when I had two motherboards in a row fail from them. So when I built my Gaming rig in 2018 I went with an ASRock. But there was some compatibility issue so I returned it and reluctantly went with Asus. It was running fine for about a year until I started to get random reboots. At first not that many and then it just got worse and worse. Until it was rebooting in the BIOS. I tried every troubleshooting step including putting it in a completely different system with completely different parts and it still rebooted. 100% a failed motherboard. And I never even overclocked anything other than running the RAM at its rated speed of 3200Mhz. So make that the third failed Asus.

 

Given all the press about MSI the only choice left was Gigabyte. I upgraded most of my system last month including their top of the line Z490 Auros Xtreme. Well long story short I was still getting issues. It would constantly boot into BIOS with errors. It would have multiple startups. M.2 drives would constantly disappear from the BIOS. I thought it was a problem with RAID so I ran them individually and still same problem. I tried 2 different sets of RAM and also had issues with it running XMP. I think I even had a random reboot one time.

 

Well there's only one choice left at this point so I replace the Gigabyte with a MSI Z490 ACE. Every single other part is exactly the same. And guess what. 100% rock solid. No multiple startups. No random reboots. RAM running at XMP 4000Mhz. All M.2 drives working perfectly in RAID. Every stress test and benchmark passed with flying colors. So far not a single issue.

 

And their overall experience is far better than the other brands too. The manual has a very detailed build guide that is specific to each model rather than being generic. The BIOS is very cleanly laid out with no scrolling and it has nice features like Search, Screenshot, and Board Explorer. It even has a physical switch to turn off all the RGB.

 

I know MSI has issues on the business side of things but their products are top notch in my book.

[xg32]

it's different for every gen but msi does have the best z490 boards, i wouldn't stick to a brand cause of 1 gen.

[Jurrunio]

MSI is inconsistent. On AM4 for example. Their B350 and X370 boards are known for instability and took them a year to fix (and X370.flagship board has the worst component among all 4 bigger brands). Their B450 and X470 lineup is honestly nice, but with X570 4 out of 6 boards MSI launched from the beginning had VRM that runs alarmingly.warm (if not outright above 100C) with a 3900X overclocked. X570 chipset was known for being expensive mind you, cheapest X570 boards start at $150 at first and there's no B550 chipset at the time to serve customers.with lower budgets buying 6 core.CPUs. I know they've done the same.on older Intel platforms, but memory has gone muddy over time.

 

Asus is always "if I can reject this, I will" type of company. The one who.rejected older AM4 boards supporting newer CPUs for example. The.villain out of 4 companies.

 

Asrock, the daring but "why you do this" company. Does things others dont try (easy to.mod.Z170 board for.Coffee Lake, first to.put TB3 port and Intel cooler mounting holes onto their X570 ITX/TB3 board etc), at the same time BIOS update can come a bit late.

 

Gigabyte, only.problem I have with them is dual BIOS implementation that's there to check a box rather than being useful (kicks you to backup BIOS when you fail to post during overclocking,.which is a big part of overclocking). People dont like the BIOS layout but I think I could still learn it.

[Mark Kaine]

I've mostly used msi in my build so far and I have to say the experience was mostly terrible. 

 

They make stylish and hip stuff for sure but quality and support are less than convincing, and I'm not going to buy any products from them anymore going forward. 

 

More PC part companies should be like Noctua and EVGA, high quality / good support, reasonable prices (yes 14 bucks for a high quality 120mm fan *is* reasonable) 

[Wheresmehammer]

MSI on LGA 1155 was pretty bad for me, on AM3 they were awesome.. not had an MSI since 1155.