jnemeth@victoria.tc.ca (John Nemeth) writes:
>      I would suggest either Asus or Tyan.  MSI isn't known as the
> greatest motherboard around.

I have a Tyan K8e (their only athlon64 board).  In most regards the
board is very well designed and one can see why they OEM motherboards
for other large companies.

They seem to have a endemic power-supply problem though.  Some boards
just don't reliably power up with some power supplies.  In my case the
motherboard when plugged in by itself with no other cards or
peripherals refuses to power up.  This is when hooked to a Seasonic
S12-430 (ATX 2.x) 400watt power supply*.  I've never had a problem with
an Asus not powering up with an arbitrary 300+ watt, current model
supply.

From poking at google, this appears to be a long-standing design
problem that extends back to their 32-bit boards too.

-wolfgang

* This is doubly annoying since that Seasonic is one of the highest
  efficiency and quietest supplies one can buy currently.