Made in Japan and worth every penny, my friens mobo I build his comp with was a dream, I was a little concerned when I heard B I think it was say the nForce 4 Ultra Abit models are a little flacky but I'm glad I persevered and got a good one.
Well technically B wasn't wrong, but the culprit was early BIOS revisions. Once flashed, the early NF4s run just fine.
I've had a couple ECS boards die and kill more than just themselves. Also I gave my friend an ECS board with a sempron and through all the abuse it has been through it's chuggin' along. I've got mixed emotions towards ECS, but you can't beat the price if you need a cheap board. I've yet to see something go wrong with my Abit NF7-s V2 board...man I love this thing-it's pretty too As for a socket A epox board with a duron and a VIA chipset it clocks from 1.0ghz to 1.2ghz without voltage increases(pencil trick). Very pleased with it and it's stabile as can be.
That's what early reviews had of their NF4 Ultra board. However, I know the DFI NF4's all had major issues with the first two official BIOS releases, and why i flashed to the 310 BIOS before I reviewed the Ultra-D. It just goes to show that doing your research helps before buying. DFI is experiencing some major issues with their Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard, and in it's current state with a price of nearly $200, I'd hang loose with that one and wait or go with an nForce 4 board or possibly the Asus A8R-MVP when it comes out (even then, I wouldn't be the first to buy one as reviews may not run across a major problem). If you can, read as many reviews as you can and see what actual users are saying about it. It helps to find out why there's problems with the motherboard. I don't think companies intentionally put out a poor product all the time, but I do think that they set deadlines to get them out, stability be damned. After Abit started seeing a crapload of issues with slew of different motherboards and their capacitors, they, along with a lot of the industry, jumped to Japanese caps. Now, I'm not faulting Abit 100% on those, as there'd be some stolen formula plans that popped up, but the formula wasn't made correctly, and those caps were the bad caps that got to everyone. I think MSI is facing a similiar lawsuit due to caps right now, but I'm not sure if it's in the same boat as the Abit one or not.
Big B is absolutely right, a Taiwanese capacitor manufacturer had stolen the capacitor formula from a promanent Japanese capacitor manufacturer, an attractive plan of action since the Japanese caps lasted many years longer than the Taiwanese equivilents on average. The problem was that Taiwanese aluminum foil is not as pure as Japanese aluminum foil due to much more lax Taiwanese manufacturing standards. As a result, the copper impurities in the Taiwanese aluminum foil capacitor linining reacted adversely with the mixture and created gas, the final result of which being exploding or leaking capacitors. Among the affected were Dell, Abit, Gigabyte, Leadtek, and many others. IIRC, the MSI issue stems from the Taiwanese caps they still use. However, it's worth noting that MSI does use 100% Japanese caps in their video cards. -AT
