Dave,

I've had pretty good luck with Gigabyte boards, MSI gave me trouble, but 
in the end I think the power supply was the culprit. BTW: The Power 
supply is one area you don't want to cut corners on.
Non of the mother boards came with any real diagnostics, maybe some 
Windows drivers, if you find one that does, please let me know.

For hardware diagnostics I use http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It does com with some mfg specific utilities, and some generic, great 
for memory tests, and hard drives.

Cheers,
Mike.




On 03/21/2011 06:20 PM, Dave Powell, MMfab wrote:
> Looks like I might be putting together a new PC by buying components 
> from NewEgg instead of my normal build-to-order routine.
>
> Does anybody know if there are any significant differences in hardware 
> diagnostics that come with motherboards from different manufacturers? 
> (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc).
>
> I'm thinking mostly about boot-from-CD diagnostics.   (Don't care 
> about Windows troubleshooting and wouldn't expect that from a mobo 
> company anyway).
>
> Good diags can save a lot of hassle, for example when a PC crashes and 
> one support person says it looks like Windows corruption, but 
> memtest86 (downloaded it because that box came with only lousy diags) 
> says memory errors and the new memory they send fixes it.  Or when 
> replacement memory doesn't fix a problem but good Dell-specific diags 
> say "DMA error" and replacement mobo fixes it.
>
> That's the kind of diagnostics I want.  But I'd rather they come with 
> the hardware if possible, partly because I've had bad results with 
> diags older than the machine, or diags intended for other machines, 
> partly to save the hassle of downloading new diags, and partly because 
> the only diags I have seen that could tell the difference between bad 
> memory and bad DMA were machine-specific ones that came with the boxes.
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