I've gone with Asus exclusively now and they have been solid for me. I didn't think I would have seen the day that I would use them again, but here I am. Shows that even though every manufacturer goes through a rough patch they can redeem themselves at some point.These days, your major brands are usually solid.
I've literally seen good and bad boards from virtually every major brand that's ever released motherboards into the U.S. market. I've seen good boards from ECS, bad boards from ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, ASRock, EVGA, you name it. Some do have better track records than others to be sure but unless you are buying the cheapest options they make, you will usually be fine with offerings from the major players.I've gone with Asus exclusively now and they have been solid for me. I didn't think I would have seen the day that I would use them again, but here I am. Shows that even though every manufacturer goes through a rough patch they can redeem themselves at some point.
I started using Gigabyte motherboards during the socket 775 era. A p965 chipset board for my first C2D and dropped in a Q6600 later. That board was still working great when I finally retired it about two years ago. The only complaint I ever had with it was the Q6600 wouldn't hit 3.6Ghz but that could have been because of the CPU rather than the board and I was never bored enough to take one of my other Q6600s which would do 3.6 and drop it in there. My second was a P35 chipset and I absolutely loved that board and it never gave me any problems until at one point the CPU power connector melted. I had just finished tearing the system apart, cleaning it and putting it back together so I figure some foreign object debris got into the socket or I screwed something up. That was a terrible day. I also had an AMD A64 Gigabyte board. It was mini ATX and had onboard video (I don't remember what socket but I had a later 4000+ dual core in it) and was reviewed on [H]. It was an impulse purchase and it did a great job for what it was (slower than Core2 but out at the same time.) Overclocked the CPU from 2.1 to 2.8 with a tiny bump in voltage and 2.9 with a lot of extra voltage. That board and CPU was retired quite a few years later and still worked fine. During the same time period I used Gigabyte boards in most of the systems I built for others; the same boards I was using but ones without the extra SATA controllers and no one had any issues with them.That board was well after GIGABYTE's quality improved. It was really during the S478 and early Athlon 64 days that I saw tons of bad GIGABYTE boards in the shop. By the time I became a reviewer, those issues largely didn't occur anymore. What I typically noticed was an issue was predominantly problems with firmware. GIGABYTE would for many years have issues with keyboards or peripherals I never saw with other brands.
These days, your major brands are usually solid. Although, garbage models get through from time to time.