QOTW: Who makes the best motherboards?

[Phage]

Used them all. Asus currently, but the MSI were great, the Gigabyte was great for OC, but would often drop it's BIOS for no clear reason, and revert to the backup.
It's all about the features and reliability.

[hb904460]

I have used Elitegroup (ECS), MSI and Asus over the past 20 years and had no major issues with any of them.
Most loved though was my MSI K8N SLI Platinum.

[Amelek]

In my early PC days i could only afford AMD CPU's. At that time MSI was one of the best, but i had alot of issues with them and at that time almost every board had a small noisy fan on the northbridge.
Some years later Intel was affordable and with Intel i used Asus cause they had the meanest board at that time, the Rampage II Extreme LGA1366. The upgrade after, and still my current, i went for the cheaper Asus P9X79-Pro LGA2011 motherboard but in not really comfortable with it cause it's very unstable atm. Could be of age (7y) and all the overclocks idk.

Now im planning to go for the cheaper Intel Z370/Z390 lineup when the new CPU's are released. Then i will probably get me a Gigabyte Gaming 7 or what their Z390 will be named.

[ddg3595]

From my experience, Asus makes the best motherboards. Their motherboards are usually stable, feature-packed, and come with software utilities that are useful.

[peterb]

From my experience, Asus makes the best motherboards. Their motherboards are usually stable, feature-packed, and come with software utilities that are useful.

Utilities that are useful only to Windows users!

[=assassin=]

I generally stick with Gigabyte, as I've found them alright overall. They're not flawless, but generally acceptable and mostly reliable from my personal experiences. I will probably try ASUS in my next build though... Regarding brands I don't like, well, MSI have been terrible for me, as every product of theirs I've ever owned has failed, and usually within a few months - terrible quality, and I'll never risk any of their stuff ever again.

[watercooled]

Hmm mentioning software brings something else up. I don't recall the last time I had a remotely positive experience with any supplied software/utilities. I've seen massively bloated driver packages, utilities which do more harm than good, drivers so buggy they cause crashes, and worse-than-useless overclocking software which I've known to cause severe instability on friends' systems by merely being installed - they weren't even it had been installed alongside important drivers, let alone that it had automatically applied horrid overclocks.

For those reasons I generally leave the disc sealed in the box, and get drivers preferably from the likes of Intel/AMD directly, or if not I'll carefully download and just the bare drivers from the website if Windows doesn't find them itself.

I just find graphical UEFI annoying too (all of them), and a waste of limited EEPROM space.

[Kanoe]

I also forgot to mention Sapphire, those all white bad boys were great in a market of everyone else being the same boring colour as each other.

[Tunnah]

I always end up with Asus, as they have so many available they always tend to have a model that suits my needs. Plus with them being so big getting repairs/returns is less of a hassle.

Supermicro for anything workstation.

[jseven15]

Gigabyte is quite good - especially their aorus series.

[3dcandy]

And to answer the question - I usually have a specific reason these days to do a build as my "work" pc has been stable for at least the last 5 years apart from an SSD upgrade and a cheeky cpu upgrade. So I look carefully at features some which I may specifically need to make my build work as I want. SO here I have a smattering of makes. Asus in work pc (because BIOS support for X5XXX series Xeon chips is good) Jetway in a music pc as it has an optical out for onboard sound that could drive stereo at different clockspeeds (some don't support 48khz well in drivers) so you can see I'm not that loyal

[jnutt]

I've used Msi for the past few years with no issues. Before that it was Supermicro but they became more server and workstation centric.

[gabwebsite]

I'm currently running an Asus board like I've always did and I like it.

I'm thinking about moving to evga next time tho

[QuorTek]

Been having Asus for the last many years, have to say had the least problems with Asus myself as it is, but also swaying towards some of the other good brands out there, to be honest no real preference as long as I get some kind of long lasting quality and up to date bios upgrades, not always the case if you tend to buy limited edition motherboards, so stay a little bit mainstream in a figure of speech

[Lord Midas]

I very rarely upgrade, but in the last 15 or so years I've had two motherboards. ABit Fatality, which ended up being rubbish and unstable.

Currently using an ASUS which has been rock solid. No complaints. And I reckon I'll be getting ASUS for my next upgrade.

[Usernamist]

If you're going with Intel, they all have good offerings. Most manufacturers cut corners and use rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishty heatsinks and powerphases on their AMD motherboards though.