Having been building PCs for about 12years now, I have been and avid AMD fan over Intel, but recent events are making me doubt AMD's future if they don't get better support from motherboard manufacturers.
I have recently experienced a number of problems with both ATI & Nvidia chipsets, and these are not on cheap boards. All my kit is good stuff, and powered by a 580w (true) Hiper Type-R PSU.
My DFI NF4 LanPrty Ultra-D started killing quality RAM, 2 lots of 1Gb Corsair PC4400c25, 1 of 1Gb Crucial Ballistix PC4000 & now 2Gb of Geil PC3200.
The board was tested as not faulty, yet all the above tested faulty in any board I tried it in, more than a coincedence IMHO. The other fault with NF4 is that a lot of the chipsets cannot do RAID, something which I had planned on using later on, and my board as well a friends plus an NF4 based MSI board also showed the exact same problem (probably also occurs on Intel NF4 boards too).
After reading several excellent reviews I bought an Asus A8R-MVP (ATI R480 chipset) to get away from the Nvidia and possibly take advantage of the Crossfire (ATI SLI) feature for my x850XTPE at a later date. I have tested every single component of my PC in another to verify all is ok, and now I'm starting to get strange crashes/reboots, and I'm not alone. It appears Asus have skimped on the power regulation with this board and lots are causing crashes or failing totally and Asus don't seem to care (just have a read of their forums on the Asus site), now how crap is that from the World's biggest mbd manufacturer?
Now with Nvidia buying out ULi/ALi a few weeks back, that really only leaves VIA to sort things out, and I'm sure most know what their track record is like.
Not looking too good is it?
AMD have a superb product which is being wasted by crappy chipsets/motherboards, and Intel have slower, power consuming & overpriced counterparts, but boy am I tempted just to get a decent bit of reliability. :shrug: