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Asus used to be a great company run by great engineers, but in the last couple of years their motherboards have become terrible. By far the worst of the big 4.
by so-and-so 3y ago
Asus used to be a great company run by great engineers, but in the last couple of years their motherboards have become terrible. By far the worst of the big 4.
- blagie 3y agoWho is considered good right now? Asus was my go-to brand for quality, but I haven't looked in a decade or more. I'm glad to pay a modest premium for reliability. I'd like parts which are well-tested, use high-quality capacitors, and have basic safety features (like over-current / over-voltage protection on power supplies). What I'd really like is a review site which steps through the engineering of things like motherboards and power supplies, tests things like short circuits on the output, and checks which passives are used and quality of things like solder joints. Most of this stuff isn't expensive.
- kiririn 3y agoSupermicro if you can find anywhere stocking their boards
- morjom 3y agoI can only recommend TechPowerup, Tom's Hardware and Buildzoid for Motherboard stuff. Those are the ones I check out. I think TPU also has PSU review?
- MrGilbert 3y agoAsrock was so annoyed being called out as "the mainboards to avoid", that they stepped up their game quite a lot. Their products are quite decent.
- raincole 3y agoFun fact: Asrock was a subsidiary* of ASUS, and its purpose was to specifically produce cheap but worse motherboards. (Just a random fun fact, not implying its product quality now) *EDIT: I mean ASUS funded it and owned it by the time. I'm not sure if "subsidiary" is the correct legal term here.
- faeyanpiraat 3y agoDo you have a reference for that?
- LegitShady 3y agoIts sort of in their wikipedia. Pegasus was the production arm of asustek, was spun off into their own company, but asus is still the largest single shareholder but doesn't have a majority ownership. Pegasus owns Asrock.
- simpleintheory 3y agoDid you mean Pegatron?
- LegitShady 3y agoautocorrect does
- LegitShady 3y agoasrock hasn't been a subsidiary of ASUS for 20+ years, but its complicated because they're owned by Pegasus. Pegasus was created in a restructering of AsusTek, so its hard to say whether or not asus still owns them or not but at arms length. They're both companies that were spun off but the corporate structure is complicated.
- raincole 3y agoYes, you're right. My use of "subsidiary" might not be legally correct here. I meant ASUS founded ASRock and owned it.
- LegitShady 3y agoand pegatron owns asrock, and asus is still the largest single shareholder in pegatron. so does asus own asrock? not entirely, not directly, but sort of.
- faeyanpiraat 3y agoAsrock was great 10 years ago, so if they are even better now, then that's great.
- bick_nyers 3y agoASRock is my go to, especially because of their support for Unbuffered ECC on consumer boards.
- borissk 3y agoMSI has by far the best BIOS team. AsRock has the best technical support.
- ziml77 3y agoThat’s good to know. I had bad experiences with MSI hardware a decade ago so I didn’t go back to them. I will try their boards the next time I upgrade
- dawidpotocki 3y agoI don't know about that. From my private email conversations with MSI motherboard team they seemed very… incompetent. They didn't know what the options they added to their firmware did and they didn't seem to understand how UEFI Secure Boot works (they thought it also works for non-UEFI OSes, somehow).
- okay_plastic 3y agoI have an MSI Z370 board. It does not support x8/x4/x4 PCIe bifurcation in BIOS despite chipset support, and using the latest BIOS it fails to POST with an Intel Arc GPU in the first slot. This latter issue is maybe defensible as Z370 doesn't technically have support for Arc, but I've read that 300 series boards from other vendors work fine, so I'm going to hold it against MSI anyways.
- 3np 3y agoSo who's better? Shopped around for ITX system and it seemed that if I wanted half-responsible firmware updates I'd have to get a SuperMicro and they don't really have what I had in mind.
- benatkin 3y agoMSI, for one. Normally, successful hardware companies are very good.
- da768 3y agoAs much as I tried to believe in Asus' reputation in the past 20 years, I'm pretty much done with them. 2 of 2 mainboards (TUF and Maximus series) with random reboot issues, 1 of 2 GPUs with firmware issues causing BSODs, 1 of 2 routers (high-end models) with power supply failure problems and sometimes corrupting settings on reboot.
- gumballindie 3y agoI updated my motherboard with a latest bios version and any os i tried just crashed. All sorts of weird errors. Reverted and all worked fine (fine for an asus board means that it sometimes doesn’t post). I’d stay away from their motherboards.
- ibitto 3y agoIs the term “big 4” for motherboard manufacturers commonly used to refer to ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, like it is for the big 4 accounting firms?
- samhuk 3y agoMy only reason for buying an ASUS motherboard was because, for a while, they had (as far as my research went a couple years ago) a complete monopoly on Thunderbolt 3-compatible AMD motherboard (ASUS ProArt Creator, IIRC?) Apart from that, tempted to agree.
- xbar 3y agoI agree completely. I replaced a 2015-era Asus Intel board with a 2021-era Asus Intel board of the same general product line (Prime) and found a great many deficiencies relative to their prior product. I had even moved "up" from the basic entry in the line. Many hassles and several missing features later, I am convinced not to purchase Asus again.