Today I bought every component I needed for a new desktop.

I bought a combo at fry's, which consisted of a P4 3.2Ghz CPU, and a ECS 848P-A Motherboard. They were on sale for $209.99, and that was cheap!

Let me just tell you, it's so 'cheap', I'm typing on my school laptop right now.

I searched Ask.com for Post Signals (Beeps of errors your motherboard will give you based on it's bios.) I had a 6-7 second beep, followed by silence, followed by the 6-7 second beep. Guess what the problem was?

- Faulty Bios
- Any CPU on this motherboard WILL overheat 2x-4x as fast

This Motherboard is not a bargain. Post additional Motherboard grief here.

Oh yes, did I mention there was a V2.0 of this board? Fry's doesn't carry it.

I used to buy a lot of motherboards and build computers - and the one thing I definitely learned was that it really does pay to buy quality. I havnt' heard of ECS - so don't know their reputation - but I found ASUS motherboards exceptionally good ( they were a little more expensive - but top quality ) but I also bought another make ( medium budget ) which were very reliable (QDI) and now have a 3 year warranty - and the cost is only around 120 usd ( equiv in UK) Maybe yours is a top notch board and you were just unlucky. In fact I bought probably over 100 QDI boards and can't remember ever having one problem with them. One of my customers insisted on supplying his own equipment and had his friend build the computers which used the cheapest motherboards and we had nothing but problems - he ended up scrapping them after six months - so it always pays to get quality on the motherboard.

Sorry - I just noticed that you said it included processor - so I guess that the the motherboard was _very_ cheap. If you can - I would recommend that you change it for another make that is known for quality - the motherboard is the most important part of your computer - and if its built on the cheap - using substandard components - you could [will] have endless problems that will never go away no matter how many bios upgrades you do.

It's really just a bunch of bull. You don't sell parts that you know don't work.

Oh god... I would expect something like this to happen here in YU...

I actualy once went for the cheap option, and after 6 months damn computer died on me... I wasn't that familiar with computers, but now that I look at that poor fried mb and cpu... Guess what... It was some hybrid of AMD K5 running on some Intel chipset (can't really remember what chipset it was, all letters are now erased beyond reading)

Since that moment, I always paid extra just for quality. I agree about ASUS MB's, they're great, though some people tend to say that ASUS is crap. My P4PE-X works excellent for me... I flashed the BIOS a while ago, and it works even better

So, now when a friend comes to me, and asks me what to buy, I always tell them to give those 50 euros more, to get a quality computer, instead of paying 200 euros later, to fix/buy fried equipment.

Unfortunately - the retailer doesn't know they don't work - till they get a lot of complaints or returns But it boils down to the quality of the components used - I remember seeing a program a long time ago where it said UK electronic companies expect to reject 1 in about one thousand components - in Japan electroncs manufacturers expect to only reject 1 in 100,000+ - and thats the difference. A board constructed of poor components may work fine - but has far more chance of failing. Until they are sold and used - we don't really know how good or reliable they will be - only thing to do is go by other's experiences
and hope we get a good one - or at least the supplier will change it for a good one if its faulty.

yeah, motherboards are the most fragile parts of a comp. It really pays to get a good quality board for 100-150. I would recommend brands such as Abit, Epox, Asus, MSI.

A few years ago I also had a faulty ASUS CUSL2-C. But here the computer shops don't know how to handle equipment properly so 99% of the time they are the ones breaking the stuff. This would not recognize the AGP card when it was in a case, when built outside of a case it sometimes did.

My friend here blew up about 3 motherboards in the past year, some were spontaneus. A capacitor leaks, something shorts and its gone. He was lucky that 2 were still under warranty and nothing happened to his CPU or Gforce 6800.

So yeah, go for the good boards, you pay more, but you won't regret it.

oh yeah...i also agreed that motherboard is the most important thing when building up computer...
for me, i spent the most budget on
1)motherboard(checking/comparing brands,the most features)...
2)then memory sticks ram(how much i wanna go)....
3)then porcessor(how much i can affort to buy the highest processor after the first two choices've done)...
4)then harddisk....(go on...)
5)graphic card/sound card...(depand on ur pro;actually this would directly telly to why do u buy the computer for and ur amount of cost.....if not, 1-2-3-4 to go for general usage and can reduce the cost-weight.....i thought)

wutever.., for my exprecience.. "MSI" motherboard is good choice....

I use ASUS mother board's and I think they do the job very efficient and good. But every once a while there is one-two motherboards on market that have "NO-NAME" mark (I mean some lazy company what you never heard of) and they show-up on tests to be better than some "brand name" company motherboards... So you can't tell when some is bad if you don't try it...