K9NGM4 MSI Failure Analysis

When I looked for a motherboard for our internet shop I was thinking for a sturdy and reliable mobo to last until all the PCs are paid up by the revenue of the business. The first thing that went through my mind is ASUS since the company has been in the motherboard business for years already and they have less negative feedbacks from users. But upon the moment of purchase I was warned by one of the PC Express technicians that the ASUS mobo that I wanted was not that sturdy and they are experiencing some installation problems with it. I was buying an AMD processor and there was only 1 ASUS mobo available for AMD processors. So I asked the store what do they recommend instead in replacement for the once thought to be reliable ASUS. And there came in MSI as their recommendation. There were a lot of MSI models for AMD so I asked for the one that gave the best on-board GPU since most of the in demand games at that time were not graphics hungry most especially the online games.  Besides, if ever the demand for higher graphics came then I will just buy external video cards to go with the gaming niche. So they gave me the MSI K9NGM4 AM2+ Socket Motherboard.  But a year has passed and 3 out of the 10 MSI mobo that I bought  has gone down the drain.

The first one that failed was brought back to the PC shop to take advantage of the warranty. The failure mode is that after some time of usiage it suddenly turns off. Then as days go by after that symptom it only took minutes or seconds after boot up then without warning the entire system will shut down. After two days of waiting PC Express then decided to return the Mobo to MSI as they cannot see what is the cause of the problem. Then after two weeks MSI simply repaced the mobo with a new one which was a relief to me.

Another problem encountered on another unit is that the mobo cannot bring light on the VGA port. The fans are rolling and the LEDs are blinking but there is nothing on the LCD display. This keeps on happening everytime you push the power button. After some disconnection of peripherals and system components you will finally see the start-up logo and  then an error message in red font saying something about overclocking failure. Then the system will be back to normal.

And the latest problem that I encountered was that the unit cannot power up. After several attempts to power it up only 5% chance that the system will go up. Just recently there was no power at all after almost a hundred presses on the power button. It seems that the unit suddenly died on me.

I'm still packing the dead PCs and have PC Express do their own assessment on the problem. I hope that they can fix them or else I will have to replace them with a new one preferrably other cheaper brand. The last board that I bought was an ECS which has the advantage of a 3-year warranty. Now that is a very attractive deal for a cheaper choice. So if you will buy a rig today or in the near future I hope that this will help. You should consider your options carefully.