Piece of junk - donate it to someone you hate
Written: Jan 10 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: if it worked: Cheap, Core2, AGP, DDR and DDR2 support.
Cons: if it worked: no pci-e, no dual channel support, no firewire
The Bottom Line: If you get it to boot it will fail soon after and run extremely unstable in between. Extremely poor quality and quality control on part of ecs.
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| gustep's Full Review: Elitegroup P4M800PRO-M (V1.0) (P4M800PRO-M V2.0) M... |
I bought this motherboard in a combo deal with a E6300 Core 2 Duo cpu. When installed the motherboard it would constantly reset, every 4 seconds or so, never even initializing the integrated graphics so the monitor never came on, you just heard a clicking sound of the built in speaker (sort of like an interrupted beep). I returned the motherboard to the retail store where I bought the combo. I received another motherboard, retail packed, never opened. The new exchanged motherboard booted at least. I could even install windows, but then a lot of other troubles started. The computer would reset for no apparent reason and sometimes the pci cards where no longer detected properly after the reset (in this case my x-fi Audigy) requiring a cold boot. This is using my Kingston HyperX memory with which I never had any trouble before (and doing extensive memtest86 testing on my old mobo) so I am sure it is not the memory.
In any case, I then saw that a new bios update was released (2006/12/14), I installed it using the windows bios updater, it said the update was successful but after I restarted and after the bios loaded (when windows should start) the computer I just displayed a few garbled characters and windows would no longer boot. When I tried to boot from the windowsxp cd to do a “repair install” the computer again reset just after displaying “press f6 to load raid drivers”. I reset the cmos a few times but nothing helped, not even the “fail safe defaults”. I created a bootable floppy (win98 dos) and re-flashed using the dos updater, again, supposedly successful but after the update the motherboard no longer reacted to any keyboard strokes, it said “date time not set, press f1 to enter setup” but hitting f1 (or f8 to try to load the boot menu) didn’t do anything. Tried both usb and ps2 keyboards, but nothing is working. I read online that people where having similar problems with this and other ecs motherboards but found no solution, so I gave up. I am exchanging it again and selling the unopened mb and will instead buy another brand mb.
When I returned the motherboards I also discovered I was not the only one returning this motherboard. At the return counter there was a whole stack of them, almost as many as they had stocked on the retail shelf when I picked up a replacement.
If you buy this board, in my experience you have a 50% chance if it being DOA (dead on arrival) and a 100% chance of failing within a few days after that. If your lucky (like me) it will fail within the 15 day warranty/exchange period and you can still return it.
I can understand one bad apple, but so many? Not a chance. Makes me wonder if this company even does any testing before shipping.
I have put together so many computer, but this is the worst product & quality I have ever seen. Stay away… FAR FAR away.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 56
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Epinions.com ID:
gustep
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Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 0 members
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