MSI 890FXA-GD70 AM3+ AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: quality of the product is fine

Cons: Their technical support is horrible - the agents are arrogant (not to mention they are stupid) and rude. Found the standard answer - it is someone else fault. After getting the regular runaround I found the answer myself. If they tell you to reinstall windows - don't belief them - I didn't and it saved me the giant nightmare of having to reinstall windows 7 and the upgrades.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the unpleasant experiences that you had with our support service.
If you can provide more details (tech name that you spoke to), and the issues you were having and the proper solution, please let us know at usreview@msi.com to allow us to improve our services.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with our tech support team directly at 626.271.1004 for assistance during regular business hours from M to F, 9am to 6pm Pacific Time.
Or you can email us at usreview@msi.com, thank you.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Liked the seven SATA connections. Recognized everything I threw at it. Overclocked my Phenom II 1055 and OCZ3P1333LVAM4GK 4x2GBs to within a hair of 4.0GHz. I got it to 4 for a bit, but it was unstable. Good BIOS, but then I was using Windows and not configuring much.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: I'm switching to Opterons, so won't be using MSI anymore.

Pros: Very fast system. It boots Fedora 17 in about 9.5 seconds from the time I type in my password to decrypt the file system. It gets through the BIOS and GRUB screens very fast as well. There is a neat little LED display reads out system temp. Stable with the 1.15 BIOS update.

Cons: You may have to flash the BIOS to have a stable linux system.

Other Thoughts: At first I was kind of frustrated due to random and frequent crashes. I've been using linux since the late 90s and daily since about 2001 and I've never had so many crashes in all that time put together as I had in the months after I set this system up. Periodically I tried all sorts of various solutions, all the major and several minor distros, even a different video card, then I'd just go back to suffering for a while till I felt like attacking the problem again.

Eventually, as a last step before starting over with completely new components, I decided to flash the BIOS -- the board came loaded with version 1.13 but the newest version was 1.15. I really should have just started there -- it solved all my problems. Just search "unetbootin freedos bios flash" -- you'll find instructions and you don't need access to a windows box. Since then, I'm in love with this system. It's fast and bulletproof.

Other components include the ASUS ENGT440 DC SL/DI/1GD3 fanless video card, AMD FX-6100 Zambezi 3.3GHz Socket AM3+ 95W Six-Core Desktop Processor, and the Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3B/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD, as well as a bunch of hard drives left over from previous systems.

Pros: It has good amount of room for customization

The OC genie was great (I ended up OC'ing the old school up to 3.82Ghz)

Looked great

Cons: I didn't really see use of the software other than the live update

I wished the pci-e x1 slot was at a different location

Other Thoughts: (I know it is a discontinued product)

I did a issue with two things, one is my board was at fault when I move components to one chassis to another. I dealt with this twice, the first time with just tinkering and yelling, it somehow stopped turning itself off randomly. Then I made another move, kind of forgot the problem I had about a year ago, came back, plus if it didn't shut down, it would lose signal. I had music going out of curiosity, it continued to play but I wasn't able to stop the music despite that the pointer is at the play button. I could of rma it but somehow the S# was missing from my catalog and found a random disneyland t-shirt in my closet? In addition, I didn't register the mb at msi. I am going to give them another chance, live update might make the mb transition easier.

The other thing is not about the board, but a review that stated that the board doesn't support amd 955 or higher, I got news for ya, I had a 965 and it worked like the way it should of. OC'd fine, never had a cpu related problem. I thought I throw that in there for kicks and jollies

Pros: Enough room for 4 dual slot GPU's. Ran great for a year, with no issues.

Cons: The voltage regulating capacitor failed on my first board. It burned right thru the motherboard and left a scorch mark on my case. In the process of failing, the board killed my AMD CPU, 2 Nvidia GPU's and burned up the 6 pin power wire. I RMA'ed the board and paid the $35 in shipping. I got my new board three weeks later only to find out that the on-board sound did not work.

I'm giving up! Will let the board sit on the shelf because it's not worth sending it back or another possible failure that destroys more components.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.

Please feel free to contact Grace from Customer Service Group directly at 626.271.1004 ext 221 to arrange for a 2nd RMA with prepaid shipping label or you can also request for advanced replacement.
Advanced replacement is subject to product availability and requires a credit card (non-prepaid type) to proceed.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: what can i say... i have had this for im guessing 2 years now... i have had no problems at all ...nothing..not one single thing has gone wrong or bad or even malfunctioned ... this is my first gaming computer i have built and i am 100% satisfied with it! i bought all my stuff from an electronics superstore (i tried posting the name but they said its offensive?) (in person) everything at once...and i tel you what... being my first time building my own computer ...i was a little worried about hooking something up wrong and POOF...but it was like putting icing on a cake...really easy... i havnt updated the bios yet at all...and i dont see any reason too...it can handle the 16 gigs of ram i got..and also my gtx460 (upgrading soon) ....i would recommend this to any of my friends :)

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: i still dont know what the numbers that light up on the board mean... mine currently says 34? hmm...oh well :)

Pros: Solid Performance with lots of room for upgrades

Cons: Check the specs on the website. This doesn't support all AM2 CPUs. For example the 955 Phenom 2 or higher is not supported. I ran it with a Phenom 2 920 and it ran flawlessly in games and other applications.

I wish there were more SATA ports for media center expansion but you can get addon cards really cheap.

Pros: It looks fancy.

Cons: I don't know what it was, but I could not seem to get this board to work in the computer I was building. I tried sending the motherboard back for replacement and the processor for replacement and still no luck. I'm sure it was incompatible with something but I couldn't tell you what, I thought I had gone through all the details on the different parts' pages to make sure everything was compatible but to no avail. I'm sure if I listed all the parts here someone could tell me, but I'm not going to, what's the point? Finally after giving up on the project for months, I ordered a new motherboard of a completely different brand and got it all up and running! (A different brand because according to MSI site they will only replace the motherboard with something similar... I didn't want something similar, I wanted something simpler and easier to work with, not overfancy.)

fyi, the problem was mostly the bad feedback I got from the board. I was used to "one beep = processor error, two beeps mean ram, etc" and all I ever got from this motherboard was "FF" displayed which when I called tech support meant that there was an issue with either the processor, video card or ram (the video card I could test with another computer, but they were all too old for the ram and processor type).

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.
Please kindly get in touch with us at usreview@msi.com with your previous RMA# and we would like to assist you to solve this issue, thank you.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Cheap, lots of options, too lazy to list, R. T . F . M

Cons: Failed for no apparent reason, computer will not boot. I always used Asus MBoards before, but wanted to give a try to this one out of a curiosity, total disaster! N/egg has lame policies on junk return, now i need to ship this garbage to factory for a replacement.

avoid like a plaque

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.

Please kindly visit the URL below to set up a RMA with the following information.
http://service.msicomputer.com/msi_user/rma_form_new.aspx

1. Full name (first, and last)
2. Telephone #
3. Physical address
4. Email address
5. Serial number (located on the box, or underneath the motherboard, eg 601-xxxx-xxxBxxxxxxxxxx)
6. Symptoms you are having onto the Special Remark section (as detailed as possible)

Once your information and warranty coverage are verified then we can proceed with this RMA for you.
Our turn-around time is typically about one week and our system will notify you automatically at every stage of your RMA process.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the product, received the unit back from RMA but are still having issues, please do not hesitate to contact us directly at usreview@msi.com and we will be more than happy to assist you, thank you.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Everything included
Been running fine for over a year
Clean BIOS

Cons: None, after a full year+

Other Thoughts: The onboard controls are nice for initial setup. As well as the LED status indicators. Had an HDD fail and the mobo was able to tell me which SATA port couldn't connect to it's drive.