What motherboard vendor do you prefer and why?

Hello, There are plenty of motherboard vendor names out there; just to name a few there are Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI, ASUS, Elite, etc. So far, each time I had to buy a new motherboard I always tended to go for Gigabyte because I see them as not that expensive for the specs they have. However I wanted to know what others think about motherboard vendors and why they prefer one brand rather then another.

Same reason why people pick one brand over another in tools, cars, etc.

There could be a good/bad experience pushing someone to/away from a brand. It could just be that one brand has features that caters more to a certain user group, some people might not look at brand but just at price, it could be a benefit (based on fact or fiction) that one brand builds better quality products, etc.

I've used boards from Gigabyte, ASUS and ASRock and had fairly mixed experiences with each.

I have an 8 year old ASUS board that is still going strong. I also have an ASUS board that lasted for about 5 years and then died completely. 5 years isn't that bad though. Neither board had a lot of features or was very high end.

The ASRock board crashed after probably about 2-3 years. It still runs OK but the onboard USB controller is completely shot. I ended up having to use a PCI USB controller instead since all of the USB ports on the board died. To be fair though this was a very low end board and was connected to a very low end power supply which ended up dying too.

My most recent motherboard is a higher end Gigabyte board. I've only had it a few months but it's worked well so far and has a lot of features (like USB 3). My only complaint is that there seems to be an engineering defect with the audio headers (either that or its a very wide spread manufacturing defect). I find that to be kind of annoying on a $300 board. I'm sure Gigabyte would have replaced the board with a fixed revision if I had RMA'd it, but honestly I don't care enough about having HD audio headers and working headphone jack detection to bother disassembling the computer to remove the motherboard.

I would rebuy either ASUS or Gigabyte in the future. I probably wouldn't rebuy ASRock though.

I chose a Gigabyte board for my first computer build and it went strong for about 2 years before I threw the computer out my window . I would definitely choose Gigabyte in the future too, based on prices and selections I saw when I was originally looking for a motherboard.

I've had Tyan and ASUS, and would re-buy both.

The Tyan was technically a server board. It was in a working system for 6 years. I currently don't have it on-line, but I'm confident if I put a new HDD in it, it would boot up with no problems.

The Asus is my current board, and I've had it for 3 years. Lots of options, and I'm happy with its stability. Overall, it's probably my favorite, so far.

I personally don't like MSI. I've worked on a lot of them, and they seem to die off quicker than most other brands. YMMV.