Help finding a good and reliable motherboard?

i'd make a comparison chart on what you get between the 2; ive been with my asus board for about 3 weeks and despite some first build shenanigans that i was worried had damaged it (was absolutely fine the only errors were silly and my fault specfically) it's been running perfectly. I believe I've heard of some quality control issues asrock had with 1 of their lower end boards, but i don't really know how their higher end board are. i've heard good things about intel nic which is the brand that comes with the asus, but ive also heard relatively decent things about broadcom (from the asrock).

the asus seems to have 1 more egg vs the asrock, but take that with a grain of salt as an unfortunately large number of the people who post user reviews are morons (half the time they are annoyed with the shipping, even when they got a perfect product, and so still give 1 star). If you have things narrowed down to only 2 boards i would recommend looking into things more yourself at this point and see who gets you what, and what the reputation for quality and support that board has

asrock actually used to be part of asus at one point apparently

Another thing you want to look into are bundled software packages. Different boards will give you different included applications (like the big thing with mine was thermal radar, which was all about monitoring temps and fan speed type of stuff. i believe the ROG boards have apps geared more towards overclocking). If you have 2 more or less equivalent boards, then software could definitely be a major consideration, as there are some fun things you can potentially get out of it (especially at boards at that price).

Asus boards have a couple of fun features that i dont believe a fair number of other boards have (although you can obviously confirm that yourself)
The first is the Q-connector, which is essentially a convenient little block with pins to plug in the various led, power button, activity light, etc. all into one place, which you can then plug into the motherboard. I believe most other boards make you do it separately, this one allows you to plug them all in at once which can save the hassle of trying to individually hook up several millimeter wide rectangles in one spot at once.
The other is the USB Bios flashback. It essentially allows you to plug in a usb with an appropriately labeled bios file into the correct usb port on the board, at which point you simply have to press a button and th board updates its bios. You only need the board and a psu, you dont even need the cpu. Convenient if you are worried about incompatability preventing startups or something like that.

As you can tell, i'm a fan of asus right now, but at the same time plenty have asrock as well and they are happy




**Although, based on the website layout alone i already prefer asus over asrock, i hate the way asrock organizes their website