"Ryan Nichols" <rnichols430 at gmail.com> writes: > Really? We bought that EXACT motherboard.. 10 to be exact and we've had 9 > fail and the 10th is on its way to major failure.. the odd thing is that > 10th one was the first one purchased and that was 6 months ago. Unless you have many hundreds of servers I would not expect that failure rate from the cheapest 'free with purchase of CPU' motherboards. (assuming they were not returns. Never buy a returned motherboard.) Are you using ESD protection? Seriously. I worked at one place where we bought SuperMicro SuperServers and assembled them ourselves. About 1 in 3 were bad before being put in production, and the ones that we did get to production had weird problems like failed NIC cards months later. I put in a strict anti-static regime (grounded conductive mats on the floor, the table and grounded foot and wrist straps) after that, we built another 70 servers. Only one failed, and they were rock-solid once in production. granted, the static problem at this office was noticeable- you would walk across the room and touch something grounded and get zapped. But you can kill a motherboard with a much smaller ESD than you can feel But being overly paranoid during assembly provably results in fewer pages in the middle of the night later on.