Asrock MOBO love affair

SpannerMonkey

just curious ive been watching this forum for quite a while now and have gotten and given advice on it , and it is full of top class people that are really helpful , a total cretit to boards.ie
But i have almost never seen any motherboard recommended that isnt an asrock . even when people have insane budgets and every computer component reviewer on the planet says there are better motherboards out there it is still an asrock board that is recommended , i have to ask WHY ?
not being sarky or agressive just honestly curious , i know they are great value for money but when the budgets are insane i really dont understand it

indough

SpannerMonkey wrote: »

just curious ive been watching this forum for quite a while now and have gotten and given advice on it , and it is full of top class people that are really helpful , a total cretit to boards.ie
But i have almost never seen any motherboard recommended that isnt an asrock . even when people have insane budgets and every computer component reviewer on the planet says there are better motherboards out there it is still an asrock board that is recommended , i have to ask WHY ?
not being sarky or agressive just honestly curious , i know they are great value for money but when the budgets are insane i really dont understand it

well they actually tend to have great features rather than just being good value for money, if that makes sense

BloodBath

Yep they tend to have more features at their price point, nice black pcb's and heatsinks and I'm totally happy with my one.

Love the UEFI bios and options + it overclocks great.

There's a huge range catering to everything you could possibly want as well.

It's not like they don't do high end either.

http://www.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?adp=0&aid=59320&agid=1601&apop=1

http://www.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/70784/ASRock+Z77+Extreme11%2C+Sockel+1155%2C+ATX.article

Practically the whole range beats it's competition for features at a lower price point.

schriss

When the budget is insane then surely people would recommend Asus or others, it probably all depends who is buying and what are his skills/desires.
I for example always use Asus Rog motherboards, but when building a PC for my brother (not gamer, not PC enthusiast), I chose Asrock because it had unique features rarely seen on other boards, for example he could use his old DDR RAM on it but later upgrade to DD2, as the board supported both. And his PC keeps going for like 5 years now or more, no problems, simply works. Also, price was his No.1 concern.

BostonB

People are generally trying to squeeze as much into a budget as they can. Be it 300 or 1000. Most people here seem to be using the same site for pricing parts also. So they are picking the cheapest boards they can. Which tend to be Asrock.

The only people who want to buy a more expensive board are looking for certain features, perhaps for stability, overlooking or similar. When I used to build machines my favourite boards were GIGABYTE but you paid a lot more for them.

Pick a forums that not building to a budget and you'll see other boards more common. For example.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=2

Gumbi

The voltages reported are lower than the actual voltages (for example when you overclock your CPU) for some of their boards. I think this has affected their reputation for some posters on some sites.

Lu Tze

The bundled software is stuff i have actually found useful, they have a ramdisk utility, and the xfast usb showed a modest increase in speed, 25 -> 33mb/s, only used when copying or backing up terabytes of data. Havent used the other utilities they provide

Burgo

Depends on budgets/needs and wants!
Recently switched from Asrock back to asus as they had what I was looking for. Pretty sure I have gone through all the major vendors at this stage.

BloodBath

Asus are the Nike of pc hardware. I'm not doubting their quality but you for sure are paying an extra premium for the brand name.

Burgo

BloodBath wrote: »

Asus are the Nike of pc hardware. I'm not doubting their quality but you for sure are paying an extra premium for the brand name.

No argument here!

Outkast_IRE

Im only on this forum the odd time , but i have reccomended the MSI motherboards after using them myself with perfect results and performance.

nesf

I think the thing is, for the average person coming on here the difference between a high end Asus board and an entry level or mid range Asrock board will be meaningless to them. They're either not going to need any of the extra features of the Asus board, not need the higher grade components because they won't be overclocking very high and similar. Or they won't have unusual requirements for bandwidth in a certain area out of the box (e.g. wanting x16 in both PCIe slots because they're running with a (large) triple monitor setup for gaming and pushing insane resolutions out (which is the only time you need to care about whether a board is x8/x8 across two slots or x16/x16 at the moment, this will probably not be the case in five years but by them you'll want a new board with a new chipset and socket anyway so...).

Asrock suffers because they used to be a brand for a major board maker and they used to make pretty poor budget end boards. They've been independent for a good while now and putting out good kit, but they still have negative connotations for a lot of people purely because of what they were like under "old management."

SpannerMonkey

nesf wrote: »

I think the thing is, for the average person coming on here the difference between a high end Asus board and an entry level or mid range Asrock board will be meaningless to them. They're either not going to need any of the extra features of the Asus board, not need the higher grade components because they won't be overclocking very high and similar. Or they won't have unusual requirements for bandwidth in a certain area out of the box (e.g. wanting x16 in both PCIe slots because they're running with a (large) triple monitor setup for gaming and pushing insane resolutions out (which is the only time you need to care about whether a board is x8/x8 across two slots or x16/x16 at the moment, this will probably not be the case in five years but by them you'll want a new board with a new chipset and socket anyway so...).

Asrock suffers because they used to be a brand for a major board maker and they used to make pretty poor budget end boards. They've been independent for a good while now and putting out good kit, but they still have negative connotations for a lot of people purely because of what they were like under "old management."

you make sense in fairness