h9dlb :
Yeh I realise that but are asrock /MSI reliable brands? I ask because I had a Biostar mobo about 10 years ago that for some reason the capacitors burned out (without overclocking) and took my gfx card and cpu with it, so I've only used gigabyte / Asus since but they are quite expensive
I would honestly go with a MSI motherboard over an ASROCK board any day. Based on my experiences with both I would never touch an asrock board. I had a couple friends that bought extreme 3 socket 1155 boards and they had ram slots die, pcie slots die, and the onboard audio die. They all have MSI and Gigabyte boards now. I've been on an MSI board for 3 years now, and one of my brothers has the MSI p67 gd-55 for his 2500k. They are great overclockers and built of high quality components, as long as you go with something above a g-43 chipset board from them.
Honestly I used to be a huge fan of ASUS boards as well until i had one of their high end boards die on me within a year. M3A32-MVP deluxe wi-fi edition was the board. $300 new. They told me I had to pay for all the shipping to get it repaired. That was to and from the place of purchase, and I had just moved to the other side of Canada. The cost was almost the same as buying a new board, so that is what I did. I also had a friend of mine go through 2 ASUS am3 crosshair iv formula boards before he got one that wasn't DOA.
I guess these things can happen to just about any manufacturer though, but with the high end Asus boards I was really surprised by the failures i've come across. After mine died I wasn't really ready to write them off, but then my buddy had 2 bad high end boards back to back before getting a good one so I started recommending MSI/Gigabyte to anyone that asked.
This is just my opinion based on mine and my friends experiences over the last few years. I fully understand that any manufacturer can have these issues, but because of those issues I decided to try my first MSI board. I was and still am impressed. One thing though about MSI boards. They seem to release boards a lot of the time that have issues with the bios out the gate, requiring an immediate update to get everything working the way it should. That is usually why reviewers run into problems with them. After the update they are golden. They shouldn't even send out a board for review before getting a better bios out IMO.