It used to be that as far as I was concerned ASUS was the "Gold 
Standard" of motherboards, but, IMHO, they have gone downhill lately - 
at least based on my experiences of the last few years.  I think that 
you will do as well as can be expected with either brand.  ASUS has 
online support and an online forum, but if they send you junk, then the 
best support won't help.  I haven't used a Gigabyte in a good many 
years.  If you follow Tom's Hardware Guide, you will see that they are 
well respected.  MSI makes decent motherboards, too, and I am using one 
now, after getting disgusted with top-end motherboards from ASUS and 
EVGA.  The one I have now is not perfect and did have some serious 
problems with it at first, but the serious problems were fixed with 
later BIOS releases.

I suggest that you pick the mb that you want with the features that you 
want.  One of the other guys here likes Intel, which he thinks makes a 
good, solid but not fancy motherboard.  Let's face it, it's a 
crap-shoot.  Go to Tom's, Extreme Tech, or Anand Tech to see if you can 
find a review of the exact models that you are looking at.  After all, 
PCBUILD is not Consumer Reports, and few people here can give you 
anything but anecdotal evidence.

Your old MSI motherboard probably has a broken trace on it somewhere 
that makes connection when the board is warm and opens when the board is 
cool.  It could be something else, too, like a solder connection.  As 
far as I am concerned, that mb would go into the trash.  (sorry)

Dean Kukral

http://www.extremetech.com/
http://www.anandtech.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/us/


On 12/16/2010 9:50 AM, Tom Waddell wrote:
> I had an MSI 785GTM-E45 MB that only booted when warm. See recent post for details if interested. Looking to replace it with either an ASUS M4A785-M or a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM MB. Both have the AMD 785 chip set, the AMD SB710, the ATI Radeon HD 4200 on-board video card with HDMI and offer a way to recover the BIOS in case an update fails. Running Win 7 Pro and have an AMD Athlon dual core processor and Corsair 800MHz DDR2 memory. Intended use is for entertainment PC hooked up to my HDTV. The MSI MB worked great but would only boot when warm. Leaning towards the Gigabyte because of the e-SATA and firewire ports and the ability to fast charge an iPOD. Interested in hearing from users of these MB or ASUS / Gigabyte in general. Tie breaker for me is level of customer support and how easy it is to make use of the manufacturers web site.
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