[blagie]

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.

Most of this stuff isn't expensive.

[MrGilbert]

Asrock 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]

Fun 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.

[LegitShady]

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.

[raincole]

Yes, you're right. My use of "subsidiary" might not be legally correct here. I meant ASUS founded ASRock and owned it.

[LegitShady]

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.

[faeyanpiraat]

Do you have a reference for that?

[LegitShady]

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.

[simpleintheory]

Did you mean Pegatron?

[LegitShady]

autocorrect does

[bick_nyers]

ASRock is my go to, especially because of their support for Unbuffered ECC on consumer boards.

[faeyanpiraat]

Asrock was great 10 years ago, so if they are even better now, then that's great.

[borissk]

MSI has by far the best BIOS team.

AsRock has the best technical support.

[ziml77]

That’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]

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).

[okay_plastic]

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.

[kiririn]

Supermicro if you can find anywhere stocking their boards

[morjom]

I 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?