Is Asrock a reliable brand?

[XDMAN123]

I plan to get an ASRock Z270 KILLER, but I haven't heard of asrock before, are their motherboards sturday and reliable? If not what is a better motherboard that I can get for $130 or lower?

[YuriNator557]

Yes, from what I remember ASUS owns them

[YuriNator557]

Just now, Strike105X said:

They broke off from asus years ago.

Ah right, I'll rememeber that

[Bananasplit_00]

ASRock are a brand i trust, they are more of a value brand usiually but support is good from what i know and the motherboards are really good for what you pay. however unless you already own the CPU wait for tomorrow and Intels new Coffee Lake CPUs to be announced

[mariushm]

Asrock are good.

They didn't break off..well it's not like engineers were fired or quit and started their own company (like Tyan and Intel I think)

 

If I remember the rumors and articles from back then, group that owned Asus was interested in making some wackier designs that were popular in Asian markets,like  boards with upgrade slots that had the new cpu socket and memory slots, and they also wanted to make some cheaper boards with Ali or SiS chipsets (that had -crappy- but nevertheless there was integrated graphics)

That's how we got boards like this one with SiS chipset http://www.asrock.com/mb/SiS/K7S41GX/index.us.asp or this Ali  based board for socket 754 with upgrade slot for socket 939 : http://www.asrock.com/mb/ULi/K8Upgrade-1689/index.us.asp

or same deal but nforce3 chipset http://www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/K8Upgrade-NF3/index.us.asp

or this socket 775 board with VIA chipset and AGP 8x AND pci express and ddr1 AND ddr2 : http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/775Dual-VSTA/index.us.asp

 

Asus was afraid of  fallback if some of these whacky designs were failures or if they were blasted negatively by reviewers, and they also didn't want intel to penalize them for using via chipsets (when intel sued via) so they launched Asrock for these weird designs.

 

Eventually, the offshoot started to produce more serious boards and more high end models and these days they're solid and quite good.

Unless you go with the cheapest models on market I'd say no worries, solid choice.

 

[emosun]

go back a few years and asrock was the worst of the worst.

It was quite literally as bad as raidmax or biostar using the cheapest VIA chipsets and needing constant bios updates and patches just to keep their boards stable. I ran an asrock board for several years and it was the worst board I've ever owned. 

They've cleaned up since then supposedly but I haven't heard anything about their longevity only initial quality.

[paddy-stone]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

go back a few years and asrock was the worst of the worst.

It was quite literally as bad as raidmax or biostar using the cheapest VIA chipsets and needing constant bios updates and patches just to keep their boards stable. I ran an asrock board for several years and it was the worst board I've ever owned. 

They've cleaned up since then supposedly but I haven't heard anything about their longevity only initial quality.

The ASrock you're talking about is when they were the budget arm of ASUS... they are a completely seperate company now and have nothing whatsover to do with Asus.

 

They actually make very good motherboards, and have some more features than other boards at the same price point usually.

[mariushm]

Just now, emosun said:

go back a few years and asrock was the worst of the worst.

[..]

They've cleaned up since then supposedly but I haven't heard anything about their longevity only initial quality.

I've had an Asrock board and it was perfectly fine for me, i think it was Asrock K7VT4 but i'm not sure. I sold it to buy an Intel D805 and moved to an Asus boards (nforce2 chipset i think).

At those times, the really budget and crappy boards were ECS .. ECS K7S5A was very popular in my country.. so popular I still remember the model name.

Had a friend back then which worked at a store that acted as a distributor to other smaller stores in the region... that year, they got around 20-30% returns on K7S5A (they moved 1000+ boards) .. and next year they stopped distributing ECS boards altogether.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

I've had an Asrock board and it was perfectly fine for me, i think it was Asrock K7VT4 but i'm not sure. I sold it to buy an Intel D805 and moved to an Asus boards (nforce2 chipset i think).

At those times, the really budget and crappy boards were ECS .. ECS K7S5A was very popular in my country.. so popular I still remember the model name.

Had a friend back then which worked at a store that acted as a distributor to other smaller stores in the region... that year, they got around 20-30% returns on K7S5A (they moved 1000+ boards) .. and next year they stopped distributing ECS boards altogether.

oh god I remember that one ECS board on tiger direct that was something like 14$ brand new. Doesn't get much scarier than than ECS lol.

[emosun]

11 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

They actually make very good motherboards, and have some more features than other boards at the same price point usually

yeah that sounds like asrock. more features , less price. thats how they got me , lol

The only thing I liked about that board was the onboard sound chip had a karaoke mode that would remove any voice from any sound coming out of the sound card which was lots of fun. Reminded me of those cheap knockoff iphones that have an fm radio built into them. such an odd feature. lol

[DDC449]

I got the same board it only last A little over a month before problems started.

[Patrick3D]

Asrock has been solid for the last 7 years or so, they tend to target the HTPC market more than any other brand.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'm under the opinion that as long as you get ASRock, ASUS, or Gigabyte and you're not getting the bottom barrel parts from them, then you're fine.

 

Or maybe as long as you don't get something from Biostar, ECS, Foxconn, or Jetway, you should be fine.

[Terminator7577]

On 8/20/2017 at 1:51 PM, XDMAN123 said:

I plan to get an ASRock Z270 KILLER

I am using an Asrock z270 killer sli/ac motherboard and it works fine.

[TheSaint]

I currently own a OC Formula Z170 mobo that has been humming along for about a year now without any issues. Rock solid with the latest BIOS flashed to it. Be warned, it was an absolute pain starting with Windows 7 (didn't want to install easily), ended up buying a Windows 8 license with USB media, installed Windows 8 and then did the free upgrade to Windows 10. 

 

The OC formula 170 stays fairly cool, has 3 m.2 slots and has tons more overclocking options in the BIOS than I could ever play with. I like that you can check for BIOS updates from within the UEFI interface. There's also a software utility for overclocking in Windows.

 

This is the only board I've bought from Asrock, but I've been very happy with it so far. 

 

Generally speaking, the best thing to do with mobos regardless of vendor is wait several months for them to be released. Wait for a revision 1.1 or 2.0 to come out to fix the initial bugs, and also make sure that the thing doesn't have any killer design flaws that even BIOS updates can't fix. When in doubt, read a lot of reviews and don't be an early adopter! 

[Intel HD Graphics]

On 8/21/2017 at 8:51 AM, XDMAN123 said:

I plan to get an ASRock Z270 KILLER, but I haven't heard of asrock before, are their motherboards sturday and reliable? If not what is a better motherboard that I can get for $130 or lower?

Asrock is a very good brand, i have a mother board from them ( z270 K6 ) and it is working just fine 

[MoonlightSylv]

My H97m Pro4 (now in my brother's PC) is great, so I'd say they're fine.