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.
Who 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.
asrock 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.
and 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.
Its 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.
I 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).
I 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.
As 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.
I 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.
So 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.
Is 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?
I 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.
My 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?)
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.