Time to replace the motherboard.

My MSI P965 Neo has been giving me nothing but hell for over a year now, and I've gotten to the point where there's no logical explanation for the problems other than it's just a worthless board.

(for instance.. I cleaned out the case the other day, and upon re-assembling it with every single cable and part in the exact same position, it won't boot with all of my RAM in - it'll do screwed up stuff like turn on for two seconds, off, then on again in 5 seconds or so to no display or beep codes. I've gone though every single possible combination of RAM modules and I can only boot with my two 512 sticks now, and the RAM is not damaged.)

Anyways, I'm not looking for solutions anymore, I'm just never again giving MSI any of my hard earned money. The board ruined my first build. So I'm in the market for a new board. My budget is about $250 - a little more is alright so long as it's justified with features I'll use.

The board needs to support my processor - Core 2 Duo E6400 @ stock 2.13GHz, my RAM - DDR2 667/800MHz dual channel, and of course my video card, an 8600 GTS.

What I'd like to see in this new board:
- SLI - dual is fine, but two PCI-E x16 slots with SLI support so that I can duplicate this card eventually
- Rear IEEE1394
- Rear eSATA
- Either onboard WiFi or three PCI slots (to accommodate for the cards I have)

I did find one board (I've been searching fir a few days now) that meets almost every single desire of mine, it was almost absolutely perfect - the Asus P5K Deluxe (here's the back panel, absolute perfection) - but it features Crossfire rather than SLI support, and I intend to stick to the nVidia line.


So I'm still searching, but I'm having difficulty basically finding an exact SLI equivalent to that Asus. If anybody knows of a similar board, I'd love a link - I need to get rid of this current board, it's driving me insane.

Just thought I'd include my decision.

I wanted an Asus board as I've heard very good things about them - I would have gone for a BFG or XFX as well if I'd seen one that suited my needs.

I was between the Asus P5K Deluxe/Premium and the P5N32-E. The P5K Deluxe has an absolutely perfect compliment of back panel I/O's, I could not have asked for a better package in that respect - dual gigabyte LAN, two eSata ports, a Firewire port, optical, coaxial, and six USB ports - one of which replaces the mouse (green) PS/2 port, which I love as there's really no need for that anymore - just the keyboard on occasion. Thing is, the P5K supports Crossfire rather than SLI - I'm really an nVidia guy and don't plan on moving to ATI any time soon. That forced me to look at alternatives - the only one I found within the general price range ($200-250) was the P5N32-E, which supported SLI, however with much fewer back I/O jacks and only 800MHz RAM (the P5K does 1066). It also had a PCI-E running at 8x, and I really don't have any need for that - it was taking up a potential PCI position which I desperately need for my expansion cards.

In the end, I did go for the P5K Premium Black Pearl edition (... something to do with water cooling compatibility).

Just to put the difference in perspective, I put everything on this board, plugged everything in, and the thing booted immediately. Absolutely immediately, no problem - the MSI was giving me problems that take days at a time to troubleshoot over a year after purchase (I'm working on contacting the CEO). Crysis now runs at 1280x768 (yea, a custom resolution for the sake of widescreen and framerate) with higher settings (everything's on 'High' and now AA is on 2x), doing about 20FPS - very good for my hardware which is not fantastic. I didn't expect the speed boost, but load times have also drastically decreased.

Just goes to show what a crappy motherboard can do for your machine.

I'm out.