Hi all.

I've never used an MSI motherboard, but today to either celebrate a Dallas Cowboy victory, or console myself in the event of a loss, there is a sale with an i7 920 and this motherboard http://www.techspot.com/review/168-msi-x58-pro-e/

I'm hoping someone can recommend MSI as I've never used their boards, but this one seems to have everything I'd need and then some and at just over $300 for the board and a boxed i7 920, so long as everything is compatible I think it's a go.

The machine will ultimately probably run a single multi-purpose optical drive 2 sata hard drives without raid, use an NVIDIA card, but onboard audio.

Any thoughts?

As far as MSI boards in general, I for one use them exclusively. Highly recommend. The manuals are pretty good, customer service is as good as any (not terrible, not spectacular) and IMHO the quality of the boards is good. BIOS, manual, drivers (if you want them) and that sort of thing are available from their website, which is also very good as far as MFGR websites go.

My current one is a P6N-SLI-FI, and I am delighted with it still. I put a review in the HCL if you're interested.

More important than the make of the boards themselves, is the actual hardware ON the board. Research what make/model of NIC, audio chip, IDE controllers, etc.., are on the board you like, and then evaluate Linux support for these individual devices.

So, I feel MSI is a good choice. If you go for it, I think, and hope, you'll like it too.

Sasha

Thanks for the reply. I did wind up going with the MSI board. There have been some real bumps in the road to the new machine, but much of this is of my own making I'm sure, and being a creature of habit I wanted to blame everything on the board from an unfamiliar manufacturer at first, but as I have gotten the machine stabilized and am on the verge of having the final audio issues resolved, I've come to appreciate MSI's documentation.

The included manual is probably the most detailed I've ever received with a new board, and it included more extras than I ever wanted really! I think it came with 4 sata cables, an sli adapter, a crossfire adapter, etc.

Aside from the audio issues (had to do some work in modprobe.d) I think most of the issues I've had stability wise were either from using a dying hdd and a suspect dvd rom to install and then the BAZILLION bios options. I think once I've moved from stabilization to OPTIMIZATION I'm really going to like this board, and the documentation, like I said, is phenomenal.

Thanks again.

Sounds good, I'm glad you're happy so far!

Did you get the D-Bracket with yours too? It's the rear-case bracket with the 4 LED's on it and usually a couple USB ports on it. The LEDs are for diagnosing motherboard issues, CPU/memory issues, etc..

Also, a tip: if the board has the D.O.T. automatic overclocking, you might set it to OFF until you get familiar with the rest of the "normal" settings. The only thing that ever locked my Linux OS with my current MSI board, was the "intelligent" overclocking. If you're into overclocking 'period' you'll find the board marvelous, but just do it manually instead of with the DOT thingy.

Have fun
Sasha

Operator error caused random reboots within minutes of starting to install slack. My first move was to set "failsafe-defaults" which my box DOES NOT LIKE. I believe it's something to do with my particular memory modules + the i7 920 and it's myriad of bios-configurable options since the memory controller is now on the cpu itself. Without the bios in front of me the settings I changed escape me. Since then, I have reinstalled slack with an old and slow DVD ROM and everything is going better. It's been running for 24 hours now so I seem to be stable.

Overclocking is coming, but only after I'm fully confident that all NEW hardware is working properly.

I did not receive an additional LED panel, but the board has LED'S all over it for troubleshooting purposes. Also after some initial fears, flashing and backing up the bios via the M-FLASH method is AWESOME, although I must say that I was unable to try the "boot" option to test drive the new bios. That may have been me misunderstanding the instructions since some of the documentation seems to by written by someone whose native language isn't English, which for better or worse is my only language.

Ok so the jury is in.........AND I LOVE THIS BOARD. The only complaint that I have is that the default bios options did not work for my particulat memory modules (patriot ddr3 1333). HOWEVER, as stated above the documentation with the board was FANTASTIC and once I got a handle on the bios options, I've been able to get myself overclocked from 2.66Ghz to 3.2 Ghz simply and stabley (it's my first try at overclocking in the 10 years I've been tinkering) and the handy reset CMOS button on the board made the first failed attempts very much less scary.

I guess a second complaint is sata and IDE connections that are set "sideways" to what I'm used to, but that was just a mild inconvenience. Everything works beautifully with Slack64 that I've tried, and I'm just thrilled!

Sounds good!

I too found a few of the connectors on my board to be 'slightly awkward' to access. The SATA connectors are very far down at the bottom and at 90' from what I would prefer. And, the board is 'pretty full' of stuff, and I have a lot of stuff plugged in and a lot of wires, so routing the wires is a time-consuming task if you're like me and pretty fussy about having a fairly neat-looking inside-of-the-case.

I've had my 1.8Ghz CPU overclocked to 3.4 GHz on this one without any glitches, but I just wanted to see if it would really do it, since there were so numerous reports after its introduction about this E2160 processor being so overclock-friendly. It is indeed.
I now run it at stock speed, in the interest of longevity

Anyhow, best of success with that

Sasha