Quality by manufacturers

[arad]

I am a newcomer to building. Can anybody share his opinion/experience with the quality of products build by various manufacturers of mobos? Gigabyte, ASUS, MCI, ECS and so on

 

[godless]

i like msi. never had a problem with them. gigabyte bios pisses me off and the lack of extras in packaging. besides that i like the gigabytes. no quality issues that i;ve encountered.

 

[jsc]

I would rank them Gigabyte, ASUS aclose second, MSI, then ECS last.

I think Gigabyte boards are a little better than ASUS, but I have to admit that the evidence is largely anecdotal. I know that, with older ASUS boards, you need to go in and physically clear the CMOS if an overclocking setting doesn't work. Don't know about the newer ones. Gigabyte boards will try to boot, and then, if they fail, reset themselves to a bootable configuration.

No experience with MSI boards. ECS tends to make basic, no frills motherboards.

I mostly build with Gigabyte boards. I used an ECS board in my desktop at work. It was more than worth every penny. Got it free as part of a package deal at Fry's.
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Building computers since 1977.

 

[tcsenter]

I am a newcomer to building. Can anybody share his opinion/experience with the quality of products build by various manufacturers of mobos? Gigabyte, ASUS, MCI, ECS and so on

There is no consistent difference in "quality" between manufacturers of similarly priced and oriented products. IOW, if you want to compare a $120 motherboard to a $60 motherboard, its a nonsensical comparison. The major differences are going to be warranty service, BIOS support, and feature differentiation such as overclocking.

 

[arad]

It looks to me that the pricing structure has more to do with the novelity of the mobo than with the quality of the parts. In this highly competitive environment is it any of the manufacturer able to afford quality parts?

 

[tcsenter]

It looks to me that the pricing structure has more to do with the novelity of the mobo than with the quality of the parts. In this highly competitive environment is it any of the manufacturer able to afford quality parts?

Well there is a price point above which you'll get things like all-solid capacitors rather than just around the CPU, six or eight layer PCB design rather than four, but that is true of all manufacturer product lines. Higher price will get you better onboard devices such as audio codecs and LAN controllers, but this goes more to feature differentiation than "quality" differentiation.

 

[arad]

Thanks to everybody for helping me understand better the quality issue