Motherboard brand for new build/upgrade?

[mekender]

So I am upgrading this year finally... I currently have a i7-930 and plan on going up to the i7-4770k. I have pretty well settled on the processor, ram and video card. Hard drives, power supply and case will stay the same.

I am pretty well set on going with a Z87 board as well.

But what brand should I go with for the board? I almost always used Gigabyte brand motherboards in my builds but am wondering if there is any reason to go with a different brand. I did use a MSI board many years back and never had any trouble with it but I went back to Gigabyte boards after that build.

I dont really do any overclocking and I dont typically run SLI but I may at some point get a 2nd video card to go in with the one I get now. I do have a bunch of hard drives internally.

So what brand and/or model to go with?

Is there any reason to go with ASUS over Gigabyte?

 

[unknownofprob]

Asus is more trusted over Gigabyte in short, but both are great suppliers. I would go for whichever suits your budget best, as Gigabyte tend to be cheaper and are generally better value. You also pay for features, some of which you may/may not need, Asus will tend to have more, hence the higher price tag, but Gigabyte boards tend to come with all the features people generally need. OC is also great on both suppliers, as both use the Z87 chipset.

 

[mekender]

My love of Gigabyte goes way back, to the days of the Socket A CPUs and before... Gigabyte boards were always the ones that had the most number of IDE connectors. But now, with everyone having 6+ SATA ports on board and external storage bays being dirt cheap, I have been wondering if it is not time to look at other options.

 

[unknownofprob]

Having SATA III 6GB/s are great nowdays, far better then the previous SATA II.