Recently my 3 watercooled gaming PC`s and 1 high end watercooled graphic workstation PC, meant that to the average person, this seemed to be a little peculiar. And i agreed, as upgrading these machines all the time started to take more time then .... Anyway, i stripped it all down, and decided to start fresh. As a big Intel and Nvidia fan, i thought i should see how good a gaming PC i could build with reasonable costs. I think AMD of late deserve more credit then they deserve, for the great innovation they contribute to the industry. So i invested in a £55 motherboard, a 7850K CPU, and managed to get a good price on a MSI R9 290 BF4 graphic card. Blimey, why do AMD not say when installing their drivers, that you have to first ensure the IGP is disabled. If you want to know anything about AMD`s Hybrid crossfire option, dont go to their website, there is no such thing. Anyhow, i ended up re-installing windows 5 times, and the AMD Cat driver, before proving that this MSI board has a fault. I was getting alot of instability, the moment any display driver was installed. Could not even install any Origin / Steam software, as system kept freezing up. Origin technicians were baffeled. Before installing AMD`s drivers, just using windows standard vga, i had 73 fps at 70 degrees in Afterburner. Not bad. So anyway, the only option now, is to start flashing the gpu bios. MSI only offer an old version of the Catalyst driver, and no option of getting a Bios file from them. Its a good thing there are other websites that offer these, like Techpowerup. So after flashing, re-installing windows, brushing my teeth, still no good, PC keeps stuttering heavily in games, windows sometimes recovers, and crashes the moment i try running GPUZ / Afterburner. Now i`m convinced this graphic card has a fault. So i remove it, re-install the drivers, and the system is rock solid once again. Now i go through MSI website, register the product, and ask for help, and after 2 weeks, the only response i got, was from a team in Nederlands, who said, sorry but i`v contacted the wrong department. I had to go back to them, ask if they can make contact with technical support, as they dont seem to want to respond to a ticket being raised, on their website. Finally i get a response, at 2am, from some guy who clearly english is very new to him, and advises me to try re-installing the display driver. I`m so fed up, i will just give this card to someone else, and preserve my anger management. Speaking from experience, my advice, if you have any problems with MSI hardware, be prepared to drop it in the bin. And Asrock fall into the same category. Asus, wow, these guys respond to technical help the same day, and give you a ticket number. Even when your Asus product is 2 years over the warranty expiration date, they still offer to collect the item from you. Asus & Gigabyte are best, and i think i`m going to stick with their hardware. Good luck
