Maybe it was isolated to an AMD thing... I never heard/see any problems with MSI on the Intel chipsets.
MSI generally make good boards, I especially like their GPU's. I just had a 970A G45, which was an $80 board in 2011. It did the job for my Phenom II 955 and came out as an AM3+ socket before there were even chips for it. I can't entirely fault them for it given the context but it definitely wasn't as stable of a board as my Gigabyte one now. MSI had 3 revisions of the 970A. The G43, G45, and G46. On the G46 they improved the coolers on the VRMs but my friend with identical setup runs a G46 and he still can't clock past 4.1GHz while I can hit 4.5GHz stable (just too hot).
I was able to overclock at stock voltage on the Gigabyte board passed what I could do on the MSI even maxing out the voltage adjustment. That's not a good sign.
