PS
 

http://www.msi.com.tw
http://www.msicomputer.com

I have heard of more MSI motherboards catching fire than any other brand. Could be just my choice of friends? I generally choose not to use them for their incendiary tendencies, but the ones I have played with were acceptable boards without a lot of memory tweaks.

Beware MSI ultras. Ive read a review on the new MSI ULTRA boards though, and the reviewer had 2 boards in a row go bad during extreme overclocking when he pushed the memory. Ill try to dig up the review somewhere.

Re: Hardcore
 

This USED to be the case. MSI used to have some great BX boards and Apollo Pro 133A boards. However, their quality has dropped in recent times in favor of their expansion into the OEM market. In my experiences, the MSI boards are not only less stable than those from competitiors, they are also more expensive and overclock pooly. MSI definitely doesn't have my vote.
-kev

Aim lower and when you hit something high it will be mroe exciting. That's what I do in life at least :)

LOL.
:D

Funny, I took that computer I built for that gal at work yesterday and had a bit of fun with it. She had a keyboard issue (user error) and wanted me to look at it, so I took Fuzzy Logic 4 (MSI app) and started seeing how high I could push it. It was a MSI KT3Ultra2 with a Radeon 9000 64MB, Western Digital 40GB 7200RPM drive, Floppy, Samsung DVD Combo Drive, Ancient Generic Modem, 1700+XP, and Crucial DDR266 256MB. I had it running normally at 11X145 (I kept it at 1900+/1600Mhz for ensured stability), and decided to have fun. I cranked up FL4 and started bumping up the FSB 1Mhz at a time. I passed the 153 (1/5 divider) mark easily, got to 166, and ran a bunch of normal apps (nothing hard), and it ran fine. I had hit 9X172 (under 1600Mhz) fine previously, but I was still at 11 multi (currently 1826Mhz aircooled). At this point I had a co-worker over my shoulder screaming "HOLY SH!T!!!" so I kept going. 170 passed, 172 passed, and it finally went to BSOD at 11X176 (1936Mhz, or about 2400+, if my reckoning of their "old" system is right, and at 1.85V/2.6V/Auto AGP Voltage with CAS2 timings being cooled by a stock XP cooler at WAY over 50C ... I almost crapped myself ... though it only reached this point inside of an idling windows XP environment). That MSI board did pretty nice, if I do say so myself. That was with PC2100 DDR, too (granted it was Crucial). I only hope that the DDR400 I'm planning on dropping into my board allows the same thing.

Epilogue: I told her of my experiment and she went nuts. I guess people don't like it when crazy computer guys see how long it takes to plow their processor into a wall. Damn heathens.