It appears I was a little hasty with my first statement. After some further troubleshooting, I found that it wasn't the board (so far), but a memory problem. I'm still checking to see if the pair or ram had a bad stick or there's an issue with dual channel. I've ruled out a bad slot though. For a summary of my problem http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/758343. The board itself has an okay layout for a single card gpu set up, but in order to remove the ram, the gpu needs to be removed so that the tabs can be opened. The only other complaint is that the BIOS version 1.0 or 1.1 (can't remember what it shipped with) is absolutely horrendous. I kept getting memory and HDD error codes, even started to get CPU failure codes!! I've upgraded to 1.5, and aside from the linked problem, the board has ran fine. This was my first build, so I don't have much to compare it to. The one thing I can say about MSI, is that their customer service was prompt in answering my tech questions, and the answers were quite clear. If you look on newegg, you'll see quite a few bad reviews, but these almost all pertain to the bad BIOS version.
sammorris,
I remember you helping me choose the components for this build, and you recommended a Gigabyte MOBO, UD3 something. Why the change?
It's been my recent experience that Gigabyte boards just can't handle two graphics cards stable, at all. Tried different graphics setups (HD3870s, HD4870X2s), and neither the X38-DS4 or X48-DS5 can pull it off. A P45 Asus board I grabbed from a friend does the job fine, but given past experience with Asus boards they're not really my favourite manufacturer. For single GPUs, I still think Gigabyte boards are excellent. You'd be amazed how many people think they have bad boards and it turns out to be memory.
For the record, I've encountered the issue with not being able to unlock memory when the graphics card's in place before - in these cases, only half-opening the tab has been enough to both remove the RAM and insert new RAM successfully with the graphics card still in place. You might want to have another look :)
The BIOS issues are disappointing though, that's one of the main reasons I criticise Asus, useless stock BIOSes. Gigabyte's aren't perfect, but they at least work. I had to update mine as I use an unusual CPU (Q9550 E0 stepping) which previous BIOSes just see as a Pentium 3 Xeon! That said, apart from showing the wrong info, it all seemed to work fine enough.
