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#135970 - 19/01/2003 07:39 PCChips motherboards are crap
pca
old hand

Registered: 20/07/1999
Posts: 1102
Loc: UK
They didn't use to be. I have used several of the old socket7 motherboard over the years, and they worked fine. Admittedly, often better in Linux then Windows, but this is not completely unexpected.

However, their later offerings seem to be getting less and less reliable. take, for instance, the pair of M810LMR athlon boards I got about 10 months ago. Both worked fine originally, but have degraded more and more over time. Both were set up identically, with 32MB Geforce2 cards, 1GHz durons, 256MB sdram, 40GB hd, CDrom, etc, as cheap games machines. They worked really well, at first.

One of the motherboard ate two 1.4GHz athlons in a row, as soon as the power was turned on. I finally came to the conclusion that, no matter what the manual said, they were duron only. Not really a problem, though, since the durons were fast enough for the purpose.

then they started getting less reliable. Locking up randomly, taking several tries to boot, and so on. At first I though it was simply windows decaying as it often does, and reinstalled both machines. No luck, the same problems recurred. One of them has now got to the point that it won't boot at all, and refuses to run windows 2000 setup or a linux installer, and the other one dies every half-hour or so.

Anyway, I'm binning both motherboards, and won't be buying more from that manufacturer. I'll stick with Asus, MSI, or Aopen from now on. They actually work!

Irritated, and had to get it off my chest

pca
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Experience is what you get just after it would have helped...

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#135971 - 20/01/2003 11:24 Re: PCChips motherboards are crap [Re: pca]
JBjorgen
carpal tunnel

Registered: 19/01/2002
Posts: 3584
Loc: Columbus, OH
Agreed. And since they've recently redone their website, it's a beeotch to find drivers for their older boards.

I've used a couple of Gigabyte boards in some of my recent machines and they've performed quite well. More reliably then the Soyo Dragon boards I was using before that. Add to that that they are cheaper then the similar offerings from Asus and Soyo.
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~ John

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#135972 - 26/01/2003 04:23 Re: PCChips motherboards are crap [Re: pca]
DarkStorm
addict

Registered: 13/04/2001
Posts: 481
Loc: Pompano Beach, Florida
[censored]! I wonder if that's what's up with my system.
I never could get the onboard ethernet to function even though Windows showed it as working it wouldn't hook up to my hub.
And every so often it will just reboot on it's own. I thought it was XP being temperamental.

You mean it could be my damn board? Great!
I just got this system last July from CompUSA because my old systems boards' chipset decided it didn't want to see any of the peripherals anymore including the IDE bus.

And I don't have any money to get another one damnit!

I'm starting to see that this year is going to suck big time.
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Steve DarkStorm Designs

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