It may have just been the cap plague for the motherboard, and the RRoD is pretty common with the 360. Had you ever replaced the 360 before? I know lots of people on their third or fourth xbox.
It was my 8th. I got it on the introduction day and in 2 years time I swapped it 6 times, all under warranty. That 7th I gave to my son in law which broke like 6 months ago. Then I bought the first incarnation of the Halo limited edition for myself and it worked fine for years, until today.
It is by far the worst piece of hardware I have ever had, seen or heard of! The only reason I would buy another piece of hardware from Microsoft (ie, the Next xbox
) is because their service is absolutely top notch.
I've also had bad reliability with the few MSI boards I've owned, and I now avoid them. Never anything catching fire, but every single one has had some kind of oddball trouble (two that had SATA problems, and one that died something like what happened with you -- though mine was out of warranty).
I bought this board without any prior investigation. I always investigate days before, reading tests, reviews etc. This was my first MSI board and honestly, it
is was one of the finest boards I have ever had. If it hadn't broke down my next board would be another MSI. I bought an MSI this time around because the 3 or 4 Asus boards and 1 gigabyte all gave me trouble. One wouldn't work with AHCI and was incompatible with SSD's, another required me to configure memory manually because SPD wasn't working right and on one other I had to use a patched, unofficial firmware because Asus in their infinite wisdom hid features which I needed to get it stable. And yet another one woudn't run memory on 200mhz with a 200mhz FSB (long time ago
), I had to disable dual channel or bring it down to 166mhz. In fact, all of them required me to change advanced settings to get them perfectly stable.
The first thing I do when I install a new board, cpu and/or memory is run memtest86, prime and some other tools. This MSI board was the first board in a long time that came faultless out of a nights' run with memtest and did 24 hours of prime95 without a failure, on BIOS defaults. Given my previous experiences, I was impressed. I'm less impressed now though as things shouldn't break down after 2 years.
Tomorrow I need to call the shop again. I left my CPU and memory on the board, its still in their test lab.