On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 07:28:35 -0600, "Chris Stolworthy"
wrote:


I have had good luck with tha Abit board, I am running it in one of my
systems and 2 of my friends run it. No problems whatsoever, I love it.

I like both and Ive been ****ed off at both. Ive had problems with
both brands the last few years. In the OLD days when I had Intel stuff
- never ever had a MB problem. But the last few years there were VIA
chipset problems I had to work around .

And then hardware problems. Ive probably had more problems with ABITs
but switched to abit after having a hardware problem on my ASUS that
drove me nuts. Im pretty sure it was the fan on the northbridge now. I
RMAd one board after mysterious lockups and they were testy. It was
the first one Id ever done. Then they sent me another one that LOCKED
UP ! Not as bad but it still did it. I traced it finally to an
intermittently working fan on the northbridge.

I replaced that fan several times and had to use thermal tape. It kept
coming back and I finally out of desperation tried superglue and
thermal paste to apply the fan - a big graphics card fan. No problems
since then. The initial problem was the fan and then it was the
thermal tape. Im glad they have passive cooling now with just a big
heatsink instead of the little bitty cheapo fans which they stick on
in some weird way that you cant replace.

Abit - Ive owned several that seemed to have big problems after about
a year or so just like the ASUS. But there was no easy fix with the
Abits. There was the story about bad caps which seemed to affect Abits
the most. Some guy was offering to replace them for a fee in the Abit
group. I assume they fixed that since then so they probably are OK
now.

Eventhough Ive had problems with 3 boards - the last one was a KT333
board which I RMAd and got a replacement which like the ASUS also
still had problems, mysterious lockups only on the highpoint
controller which I think I traced to drivers and the problem still
seems to be there---- the thing about abit is - if you do have
problems they are very very responsive unlike ASUS. So I probably
wouldnt mind getting either one at this point. I dont use the
highpoint "extra" IDE connections now, just use the first two channels
and use it as a second PC.