MSI is still on the come up. Can’t think of a bad component they’ve released in many years.
ASRock is always rock solid.
Gigabyte seems to be making a comeback.
NZXT just started expanding on making components, and has really feature stuff. One to watch, though higher-end.
It’s funny, ASRock went from a company I’d never fucking heard of to one of the top names in the space. I used to be like “what’s this no-name brand?” and now I’m like “Oh ASRock, I know them.”
Unrelated, I miss the old Gigabyte Dual BIOS, where it had a backup BIOS in case the default got corrupted. Which mine did, a lot.
EDIT: NZXT? Wait, this NZXT? https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2021/NZXT-Recalls-H1-Computer-Cases-Due-to-Fire-Hazard I’d personally wait a while before jumping all in on them. Fire hazards in components is a pretty big fuckin deal.
I miss the old Gigabyte Dual BIOS, where it had a backup BIOS in case the default got corrupted.
This is on many higher end enthusiast/overclocking type motherboards, I’ve had it on multiple MSI and Gigabyte boards.
it was spun-off from asus in '02, then acquired by a different spin-off in '10 which asus retains significant ownership of. so, yea, basically asrock is their “discount” brand,
ASRock makes high end server parts that Asus has no equivalent.
+1 for MSI. I’ve bought GPUs from them for 10+ years and never once had a failure or even a minor issue. Got a lot of mileage out of the GTX 1080 I bought in 2016.
I liked ASrock when they were in the ECS tier of quirky and weird. Got a Socket 939 board with the ULi M1695 chipset that was really nifty.
Then I had an awful experience with an AM3 board that claimed to run a FX-8350, until they edited their support list.
I grudgingly chose them for AM5 because it was $50 cheaper for the featured I wanted, and it’s been okay, aside from me breaking the x16 slot clip due to hamfistedly removing a shipping-container sized GPU.
Glad you brought up ECS. Not good for high-end computing, but really stable for low-end. I have a customer with an Athlon64 box I built them in a pinch almost 20 years ago now that just runs a POS system, and it’s never caused him a single problem. Sometimes budget minded brands work in a pinch. ECS is not super well known, but always been great with customer service and advance RMA replacements. I wouldn’t call their hardware super sturdy in some cases though.
