MSI A55M-P33 FM1 AMD A55 (Hudson D2) Micro ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

Pros: Cheap but you get what you pay for.

Cons: I bought three of these boards at the same time for three different custom builds. ALL WERE BAD. All of them crashed and died within a month. Random crashes, the onboard video died and gave artifacts/lines on three different LCD's. I have two RMA'd and I am currently testing them. Hopefully they will work.

Other Thoughts: You get what you pay for, however I have never had a bad gigabyte board. Maybe I got lucky with them but all my Asus and MSI boards fail quickly. :(

Pros: Built almost a dozen machines using this board. Everything has been working reliably up to this point. At first I felt skeptical of MSI motherboards because I have no experience with them, but now they are another reliable brand on my mobo list.

Cons: None

Pros: Low cost, and had all the basic features I was looking for - 6 SATA II ports, PCIe for future expansion, and support for up to 16GB ram, all in a mATX form factor.

Cons: Only 2 DDR3 slots, but I knew that going in.

Other Thoughts: Using this with a dual-core FM1 and 8GB of RAM as a FreeNAS (8.3.x) box. Its been rock-solid since its been stood-up, and I did not have any issues with drivers. Was running 6x 1.5TB WD Green devices, and average CPU utilization barely spiked above 20% when transfering files.

Pros: Good BIOS options, solid built, cheap

Cons: Drivers caused constant power state failures. Replaced CPU, still issues. Replaced Video Card, still issues. Finally placed RMA and am awaiting it's return to me.

Other Thoughts: You really get what you pay for. Drivers for this board are terrible, I would look elsewhere.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.
Probably just some settings that needed to be looked into.

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: This board has nice features for its price. There are some overclocking options (didn't see a cpu vcore, but you can set the memory volts and speeds and timings). Was able to do some slight overclocking while testing (waiting for the case to arrive) and the board was very stable.

Cons: Can't manually assign RAM amount to the onboard gpu and you can't manually set the voltage on your apu

Other Thoughts: I built a complete system for a few pennies under $225 for my gf's mother.
A4-3300 2.5 ghz + 6410D
MSI A55M-P33
WD 500 gig AAKS sata 6 7200rpm
Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 4GB (2 x 2GB) 1600 mhz
Logisys 480w
DIYPC case

Pros: Upgraded my NAS case with this board paired with an A4 processor. Once drivers were installed everything was up and running in no time.

Cons: None

Pros: Bought the combo with the AMD A4 3400 and 8Gb of Corsair memory... a good deal for the combo price. This is a repair installation for my workstation. It replaces a Semperon 3400 that has been glitchy for way too long and finally quit altogether. The switch was easy and didn't even need OS repair, it just booted up, put in the driver disk, all good. The new parts are such a delight... all that aggreivation is gone!

Cons: No PATA controller, I couldn't use my old DVD drive (fortunately I have a boneyard of parts, so finding a SATA DVD was just a little extra). My bad, though - didn't read the spex, although I probably would have bought it anyway

Other Thoughts: NewEgg got it to me the next day!!!!!!!!! with no extra shipping or handling charge. How did they do that?

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Where do I start.

1. Manual in box is a joke, one on CD not much better.
2. Raid driver for Windows 7 x64 is not on the disk, nor on their site. Must be downloaded from AMD.
3. Constantly locks up after 2 or 3 mins - going back tonight.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.
RAID driver can be downloaded from the link below.
http://www.msi.com/service/download/driver-17553.html

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: Works... This is my second board, first did absolutely nothing for me. (first review 1/14/2013) Ended up going with Win8 on this one, a4-3400 stable at 3.6. Just glad it works...

Cons: Can't go past 3.6. Had to RMA the first one. Experiencing some sort of sporadic streaming issue (bad for HTPC), still trying to pinpoint the cause of that.

Other Thoughts: The combo I got this in was inexpensive, and also the first time I had purchased a combo rather than getting parts piece by piece. I will probably go back to getting parts piece by piece.

Pros: None

Cons: Unable to run linux in EFI mode. I tried with ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, systemrescuecd, and a couple others. Black screen, doesn't start up. I used "nomodeset" on the grub command line, the recommended method for fixing this problem, but it did not work.
Furthermore, MSI has no intention of supporting Linux. This is a WINDOWS-ONLY board and should not be purchased by anyone intending to run Linux on there.

This is what they said in reponse to my support ticket:
"Unfortunately MSI support only provides user support for windows based operating systems, Linux based we cannot guarantee too much, please verify with a windows OS to confirm issue, I apologize for the inconvenience."

Newegg, please mark this board with a "WINDOWS-ONLY" tag in the specifications, and consider doing so for all MSI products.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues that you are having with this product.
Unfortunately, Linux is not a mainstream OS unlike Windows therefore there's no support for Linux, thank you for your understanding.

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