I'll never buy another MSI product again, here's why.

Back in March of 2008, I spent over $200 and purchased a motherboard in anticipation of my next (Phenom II X4 940) build. It was more than I had ever dreamed of having before. It was the MSI K9A2 Platinum v1.0. It had the awesome AMD 790FX northbridge and although it only had the ATi SB600 southbridge, it was the only 790FX motherboard that had its PCI-Express x16 lanes arranged so that it could hold 4 double-wide Radeon cards. I purchased this board with confidence that such a high-end board would be extremely durable and long-lived as long as I didn't try anything like overclocking. Well, to date, I have NEVER OC'd my X4 940 because I never felt the need to. It's still plenty fast for anything I've ever wanted it to do.

Well, in early July, my system started acting up. It had intermittent problems with posting and those intermittent problems became so common that they became the norm. The computer would also freeze while being used which led me to have to press the reset button which again made me have to try several times to get it to post again. Of course, I never dreamed that a once-flagship motherboard would be the problem, especially since I took such good care of it. I originally thought that my OCZ Z-Series 1000w PSU was the problem because the system would turn on by only flicking the back switch on the PSU, without pressing the power button. I contacted OCZ and they said that the behaviour my system was experiencing was not PSU-related. I tried switching my PSU to another one of my systems and sure enough, the problem ceased. It wasn't the PSU, so I thought maybe it was my computer case.

My case had 2x120mm Thermaltake adjustable fans (Some of the most powerful case fans that money can buy) and an 80mm fan in the side panel. I made damn sure that heat would not be a problem for my system, especially since I use Radeon HD 4870s. I changed my case from that PowerUp gaming Mid-Tower to the massive Ultra Black ULT-40670 Full-Tower case because I reasoned that the relatively cheap power wiring in my PowerUp case was probably the culprit. Well, after luckily finding that huge (and beautiful!) case on sale at a Tiger Direct outlet store for $130CAD, I was certain that my problems would be over. I couldn't have been more wrong. After spending the hours switching my system over to the new case, I turned it on. There was no change at all but it did post, twice in fact. Little did I know that those would be the last times that my K9A2 Platinum would ever post.

I was in shock. I'd never had a motherboard fail on me that quickly before and I've been building systems since 1988 (at the age of 12). I still have an old ECS PM800-M2 with a Celeron D as my fileserver running in my basement and an old ASUS P4P800 with a P4 2.4 running as my HTPC. Both of those boards are almost 10 years old and they're still running flawlessly. I even gave my old ASRock 4Core Dual-VSTA motherboard to my cousin so he could have a PC that runs games and that one was running a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz Conroe, it's also still running perfectly. I wondered what to do next since I knew that this sort of thing must have been pretty rare.

I still didn't fully believe that it was my motherboard but rather than pay Tiger Direct over $50 to diagnose it, I spent $50 on a cheap ECS A780GM-A motherboard with an AMD 770 chipset. I was limited in my choices due to the fact that the Phenom II X4 940 is not an AM3 CPU and so I had to get an AM2+ motherboard. I couldn't find ANY that supported Crossfire so I just made sure that the one I got could hold my 8GB of DDR2-800. As soon as I moved everything over to the new motherboard, all my problems ceased. It had been confirmed, my MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard had failed 3 years and 4-5 months after its initial purchase.

I realised that it had only been 4-5 months since my warranty expired and so I contacted MSI support. I thought to myself "Sure, it's only a 3 year warranty but MSI wouldn't want a customer to be burned on one of their flagship boards by having it fail essentially right after the warranty ends." I didn't expect a replacement but I thought "Maybe they'll send me a coupon that I can use to get a discount on another MSI motherboard to replace this one." Well, their answer was "We are sorry, but your warranty expired in March of this year." which was basically the same as "Get lost kid, ya bother me!". I didn't even know what to say in reply because I didn't anticipate that response.

I just wanted to let everyone know about this and I can guarantee you that I will NEVER buy another MSI product again. It's such a shame too because before this happened, I was absolutely THRILLED with my motherboard's performance and had even updated the BIOS so that it could recognise Thuban. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

*rant over*

I completely understand your frustration. My wife's Acer 7740 laptop I bought her for school died exactly 2 days after the warranty ran out. I myself have an Asus A7n8X motherboard running an AMD XP stable my kids use for over 10 years. The build quality is deteriorating on a lot of electronics and I am not happy myself.
On the bright side, I bought the wife a Lenovo IdeaPad with a 3 year warranty. Hopefully the Lenovo will change my perspective.

Just a question does your new board run DDR3?

Because the phenom II 940 Only has a ddr2 memory controller on chip.

Too bad... But I'm sure every other board manufacturer will say the same under the same circumstances. ~3 1/2 years is not bad. But of course, you are entitled to your feeling. I just thought that if you do not want to buy another MSI board, it should be for the right reasons... I am not an MSI employee either... but definitely a fan.