PC Hardware → best motherboard besides Asus and Gigabyte

What the next best brand of mother board is best besides Asus and Gigabyte?

I have had good luck with Abit.

Abit does have a Intel 1150 board.

I don't think Abit has made motherboards in years.

The other major motherboard manufacturers today are ASRock and MSI. I have no experience with MSI motherboards, but I recently built my kids a PC using a budget ASRock mobo and I was impressed with the quality of the UEFI BIOS.

ASRock was spun off from Asus in 2002.

I've been impressed with AsRock too.
I've had a MSI board before and it was fine too, however user friendly wasn't a strong point.
Even the MSI forums said that.

Evga look good in quality too, but expensive.
I've not had chance to be involved with one though so cannot provide any insight.

For quality and stability, I would currently put Intel up there with the best. I don't relish the thought of what the choices will be in 2 years time.

Abit's site may still be up but it has been a ghost town for many years. It looks like they officially closed up shop 2008/2009 era.

Those two (Asus and Gigabyte) are my go-to brands as well. Evga is a good choice and I've heard ASRock is good as well though I've never used anything from them. Intel is generally king for corporate stability (though most brands have corporate stable board offerings too) but severely lacking in the features and overclocking front. It really depends on your goal with the build.

In truth I originally meant to post ASRock (used in my last two builds) but I must have had a "senior moment" while mentally reviewing my past boards.

This is the reason why I do not want a Asus motherboard. any more

»Does not boot to cd-rom on a restart

This one doing the same thing about booting. I thought I lost a ssd drive and bought another on. I did think about trying it in my other computer which the drive was ok. I have used Asus motherboards for all of builds. I have Asus board in my other computer.

I know an engineer that swears by MicroStar International (MSI). I've had a couple of their boards and they never gave any trouble. Personally, I put MSI above Gigabyte.

Asrock and, believe it or not, Biostar (from my personal experiences only). I had 5 different Biostar boards in different PC's since 2006, not one has ever failed. 3 of those pc's are still working today, 7 years old now.

And Asrock is what I use to usually build current builds for friends and stuff...I just like their features-to-price ratio and they have yet to fail me.

MSI.

I'm with you on the Asus issues as I have two machines with odd issues. My home theatre machine will try and boot to the CD-ROM, even though it is set to boot to hard drive. It then errors out. Funny thing is this only happens once, if I reset the machine it boots as it should

My main machine has an issue where it frequently reboots after issuing a shutdown command from Windows. I have to manually power it off.

Which motherboard models are you having these issues with,.....?

Ive used Asus, Abit and Gigabyte and never had any problems with them. As someone already stated, Abit died some years ago sadly.

ASUS P9X79 DELUXE is in my main machine. I'd have to check on the home theatre machine. I don't remember the BIOS version, but I believe the latest on both.

Interesting, I have the exact same motherboard (P9X79 Deluxe) and an Asus X99-A but I haven't run into such problems yet (knock on wood).

Occasionally a while back it would stall on the BIOS / UEFI splash screen but that hasn't happened in a long time. When it did I had to either unplug the power or turn off the PSU switch. I suspect that problem went away with a UEFI upgrade. Although I think it would only happen when I had a number of different bootable devices plugged into a USB HUB. If I unplugged some of the bootable devices or the USB HUB it would boot fine.

I had a Gigabyte board that I liked a lot. The GA-P35C-DS3R. It was the only retail board that I bought that developed enough of a problem that I had to pull it out of service (out of warranty). Some odd thing with the BIOS where it wouldn't hold the settings. It wasn't the battery or the CMOS jumper and it didn't have a removable chip for the BIOS or dual chips.

Guys I bought a AsRock motherboard. It should be here Thursday.

Part of the issue may be what I have connected. I have two fully loaded Mediasonic ProBoxes connected and on at boot. I set the Mediasonic ProBoxes to always be on, better than the other options available to me.

As mentioned earlier in the thread the answer partly depends on what you are looking to get out of the board.

Are you looking to overclock or otherwise perform any tweaking? Do you want stability? Do you want good support? Do you want special purpose (such as mini-itx size or very low power use)?

I would toss my vote in for Intel but only if you are not looking to over overclock. For non-desktop I would also recommend super-micro.

I have gone through many Asus boards over the years and have always been happy with them. Asus support, however, leaves a bit to be desired. I've had two different boards at two different times experience a failure requiring RMA replacement. In both cases the board was simply sent back untouched and still failed on my first replacement attempt. In the first case I tried again and got the very same board back still unfixed a second time. Only after escalation and repeated insistence was I able to get an advance RMA to ensure this did not happen again (in both cases). Note that out of over 14 different boards over the course of almost as many years I have only ever had these two failures. My experiences are apparently not out of line with those of others.

Since I no longer have the time (or desire) to overclock and tweak systems and aim now for lower-power with higher RAS I have started to use Intel boards.

Care to share which board?

I bought the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 LGA 1150 Intel Z97 from neweeg for $164.00 $8. for 3 day shipping.

Enjoy!

I have to amend this statement.

It turns out that the motherboard didn't actually stall/ freeze on the UEFI/BIOS splash screen. Rather it would take longer then expected to advance past it.

All brands and boards have issues from time to time. Regardless of their quality.

Like most others, my first choice is always Gigabyte or Asus.

I've also used MSI, EVGA, BioStar, Jetway, and Super Micro...all without issue.

The biggest difference between the quality brands and the budget brands are features, accessories, and BIOS options. Barring a lemon, they are all reliable when installed correctly with quality parts.

Just a update the asrock was bad also the usb ports would not work. I traveled 130 miles one to frys and bought a gagabit mother and that one was bad. it would not post. WEnt back the next and exchanged to a ASus Z97 deluxe . It been running ok for the last 2 weeks. So a total of 5 motherboards was bad.

If you are buying a board IRL, show up with the CPU, ram, and PSU, and make them do a POST test before you leave. I learned the hard way and went through two $400 boards until I get a working Asus Maximus V Formula.

I'm not sure if i should swear off Asus or Microcenter, but I am fairly sure my next mobo will be Asrock, Gigabyte, or EVGA.

Mobos are typically where you can skimp and get the cheapest board that fits your form factor and connections/SATA needs. But I enjoy splurging--I definitely cannot argue with the ASUS suite of tools.

Th first board I bought was a Asus Maximus. the next was Maximas V tired the Asrock and Gigabte. Then backto the Asus Z97 deluxe.

Personally I'm pretty put off by Gigabyte mobos. I used to love them, but a few PC's I've built had nothing but issues. My own personal for my last build drove me insane. Thing would turn on off on off on when starting up, replaced it within 30 days yet had the same issue. Ended up living with it for about a year until it started doing it more, the thing would cycle a good 20x. I also had overclock issues and was unable to get my 2500k past 4 ghz (I assumed dud CPU), sure as shit after I replaced it with an ASRock I had no issues overclocking.

I have four computers. There are Gigabyte (one is socket 1155, another is AM3 and the other is AM3+). Gigabyte are my go to boards since having a string of failed MSI mobo. The 4th computer is a Asrock socket 775. I'm also had rock solid service from the Asrock mobo. Isn't Asrock a division of Asus?