Dont buy MSI

I've had so much problems with this company im never selling another MSI product again to any of my customers.
In the past year i've had more MSI motherboards returned then all hardware put together for sure.
I've never wanted to bash a company but my god after hundred boxes you get sick of it.

No matter what the reviews say about these borads and how fast and great they are, they lack the basic quality control and only lasts for few monthes.

I'm so convinced MSI Canada's RMA department is run by monkeys who send back motherboards that are so called fixed with popped capacitors and dead bios.

This never effected me untill i had to RMA one of my own motherboards and waiting for 2 weeks for it to come back only to find out the bios was dead. Not funny when it happens to you is it?

yep same with gigabyte

As most people around here know, I have been bashing MSI for the past year. The reviews are phony. Either they get them with bribes or cherry picking, but it is clear they are fraudulent. This proves that getting good reviews has nothing to do with product quality. I, for one, will never buy MSI anything, nor will I recommend their products to anyone even if I don't like them.

rseven said:

As most people around here know, I have been bashing MSI for the past year. The reviews are phony. Either they get them with bribes or cherry picking, but it is clear they are fraudulent. This proves that getting good reviews has nothing to do with product quality. I, for one, will never buy MSI anything, nor will I recommend their products to anyone even if I don't like them.

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I know MSI has given a lot of people problems, but my last two amd boards have been MSI. One is rock stable in my server, has been great for the past four years, decent at overclocking too. The one in my sig is nice as well. Sure, I've had some problems now and then, but nothing died on me.

icedogg9999 said:

I know MSI has given a lot of people problems, but my last two amd boards have been MSI. One is rock stable in my server, has been great for the past four years, decent at overclocking too. The one in my sig is nice as well. Sure, I've had some problems now and then, but nothing died on me.

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It seems that quality control for MSI has declined markedly in the past year or so. I too, have many older MSI boards in the field which continue to provide flawless performance.

Thanks for the post, henesse. I'm sure that you've saved several folks from some bad experiences.

Sh**......... I just got one like....ahh...1 month ago...dont tell me this now

WaTTz said:

Sh**......... I just got one like....ahh...1 month ago...dont tell me this now

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You should be fine, have you had any problems recently? I might look at other boards when I purchase my first PCIe board, for socket M2 most likely.

icedogg9999 said:

You should be fine, have you had any problems recently? I might look at other boards when I purchase my first PCIe board, for socket M2 most likely.

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If you've already go the board, don't sweat unless it breaks. I bought a Neo plat4 about 8 months ago on a whim and a review and installed it on one of our workstations and it's been performing fine. Most of the dead boards are DOA, so if yours is up and running, you should be fine.

I understand if something dies but getting constant RMA's is bad.
Im not the only one that feels this way.
My distributer even thinks MSI might not be worth selling because of the
low profit margine in haardware now days.

Think of it this way.
my distributer gets a product from MSI for 100 and sells it to me for 115 and i sell that same product to my customer for 130. sending the mobo back would cost about $10, so my distributers profit has become $5. a profit of $5 is not enoguh at all and worth spending the time or money to store in warehouse. MSI better get thier **** together.

stay away from them and dont trust any reviews on MSI cause almost all of them are payed by MSI.
ASUS and DFI has always been a good brand and thier RMA departments are very good.

Tell you the truth ASUS, DFI, AMD, INTEL, Sapphire, ATI, WD has some of the best RMA turn around time and quality control.

we should have a section where customers could review the companies.

ii havent had any problems w/them and iv had mobo's and currently got a gtx
id guess im just lucky so far. that bites tho
it seems plenty of companies these days suck

henesse said:

Tell you the truth ASUS, DFI, AMD, INTEL, Sapphire, ATI, WD has some of the best RMA turn around time and quality control.

we should have a section where customers could review the companies.

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Let's not forget Logitech, which will immediately send you a new keyboard or mouse without requiring you to send back the old one. Seagate also has a very efficient online RMA service which issues your RMA immediately upon submission of a legitimate serial number.

I've sent the SAME msi motherboard back to them for the business I work for THREE TIMES. First was the initial problem. Second RMA was because it had a dead bios. Third was because the replacement board they sent had the VGA connector soddered on wrong and it wouldn't fit into the i/o shield.

Their packing is also rediculious. When we get an RMA back from them it's the basic motherboard box, a layer of that soft-foam. the board, the cardboard spacer, top of box, taped and shipped. Absolutely NO protection. I've started sending the boards back just the way they ship 'em to us. It's rediculious. I will NEVER buy MSI.

I still think its amazing how fast peoples minds change on this subject heh. I still remember when i was looking into going 939 and EVERYONE was raving about the neo2 board as a solid choice. it was like pretty much untill the ultra D came out.
Sure, i have had a number of my own problems with it, Ive never had to rma though, and the only time it died on me, it was my fault completly.

I dont know, I think for as many people who rag on the company, there are just as many people who have msi products WORKING in their systems and are happy with them. My kt400 ultra, of my past pc, and my current nx6600GT*633core* for example have made me happy.

My good friend has had msi for years, running in his media creation box and both my sisters are using msi rs480 boards, both are happy.

I think its expected to get lemons from any company these days. Personally, i hate how finicky DFI boards can be, love gigabyte for making solid, stable products and hate asus for for the opposite.

dood, of course there are more working motherboards then dead MSI products!

This isnt about the ratio of working and non working boards.
its about RMA, Customer service, taking care of the guys who buy your product after selling it, making sure the vendors and distributers who put thier trust in a manufacture and sell thier products are taken care of when something goes wrong.

I would say 20% - 30% of all MSI boards are returned to me with non bios related problems. If you think thats bad you should go into the RMA departments in some of my distributers and all you see is MSI.

pwnt by pat said:

I've sent the SAME msi motherboard back to them for the business I work for THREE TIMES. First was the initial problem. Second RMA was because it had a dead bios. Third was because the replacement board they sent had the VGA connector soddered on wrong and it wouldn't fit into the i/o shield.

Their packing is also rediculious. When we get an RMA back from them it's the basic motherboard box, a layer of that soft-foam. the board, the cardboard spacer, top of box, taped and shipped. Absolutely NO protection. I've started sending the boards back just the way they ship 'em to us. It's rediculious. I will NEVER buy MSI.

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yeah you are so right, they sent me motherboards back with just the S shaped foam and the mobo box. i've even got ones back without static bags.
Hell, i even got mobos in DFI and ASUS boxes.

Very bad RMA program.

DFI is a very good company. Price is on the high side but they are well worth it. everytime i sell one, im happy knowing the customer wont be coming back with a problem. I only get some dead bios coming back because of some *** monkey messed up while flashing the bios.

Valk said:

I still think its amazing how fast peoples minds change on this subject heh. I still remember when i was looking into going 939 and EVERYONE was raving about the neo2 board as a solid choice. it was like pretty much untill the ultra D came out.

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Hehe..not me! I picked the ASUS A8V (Rev 2.00). Very stable board! NF3 was crap at that point, so I chose VIA. Also, the Linux distro's I tried at that point seemed to prefer VIA over NFx. Every company has its problems. As long as it isn't hardware based, I'm happy. ASUS had no hardware problems. Their BIOS support was crap (broke more things than it fixed) and the customer service was horrible. I can live with that as the board I got was of very high quality, albeit limited when it came to OC'ing features (notably in the DRAM department).

The MSI rig I helped my buddy setup was a nightmare. Till date I could not explain the random BSOD's. I went as far as using ALL my components (guarenteed stable on my rig) on his board, to no avail.

My DFI NF4 has been a mixed bag. The first one was crap and I had to RMA it (dead DIMM slot). The second one (current) is 100x better and has been good to me thus far. The only problems I saw was w.r.t CH based RAM (no POST) and the crap NF4 Ethernet. I'm not very happy with hardware problems, but the overclocks I have obtained help me gloss over those issues (at least momentarily).

MSI caught hell over their older socket-A boards because of capacitor failures. I think they even got slapped with a class-action suit, but don't hold me to that. I have replaced several MSI boards over the years too, all for bad caps. My fileserver runs an MSI board and one of the caps has gone bad. Still runs fine though (for now).

I have a Neo2 in my game rig that has been an excellent board however. It has run for 8-9 months at 300MHz bus without a hickup. I never mess with it though, because once I have something stable I don't change it and tinker with it until I break it, unlike some guys. I find that at least part of the time, it's the "obsessive-compulsive" overclockers that you run into sometimes on here that complain like that. Push it and it might break, that's the risk we take every time we flash or overvolt or push anything beyond spec. One weak link and the whole shebang comes crashing down around you.

Brands fall in and out of the gripe list, and MSI is no exception. Abit has been there, ASUS has etc. I've watched it ebb and flow for years. MSI will come out of it most likely, and someone else will join the list for a while.

Right now would I buy an MSI board? Probably not. One thing I know to be true is that trends speak volumes. If a retailer/shop is seeing a trend with MSI failures, and he's not an MSI-only shop, then there is probably a reason for that, and that reason is probably MSI's fault. There again, ebb and flow man. This time next year, someone else will suck.

I just wanted to say that I own a MSI board right now and its been doing really well. I regret not getting the Ultra D because the very lacking BIOS on the Neo4Plat. Good board, maybe I got lucky.