What hardware brand has the best or worst reputation for quality?

[Jaw709]

You see a lot about Asus recently getting exposed for poor customer service and mild incompetence for not updating their Intel power plan correctly (jayz2cents). I think gigabyte has a connotation for being cheaper quality, although has served me well.

 

What brands do you think have the best I guess perceived reputation for quality and reliability?

[Levent]

Our thought process is defined by our past experiences.

 

People shit on GB motherboards, I like them and chose them over other brands due how reliable they have been for me. People don’t like Asus but their warranty is absolutely top notch in my country. I have had extremely bad experiences with MSI graphics cards and motherboards so even if they were the best I wouldn’t even consider them. 

 

 

TLDR, no universal answer here.

[emosun]

13 minutes ago, Jaw709 said:

What brands do you think have the best I guess perceived reputation for quality and reliability?

most brands in the professional space are more reliable than consumer electronics

server parts , IT infrastructure , etc.... supermicro is pretty good from my experience 

I'll still never forgive Asrock for making some of the worst motherboards on earth. In the windows xp days Asrock just made garbage. thank god new people are born to replace the old people otherwise asrock would have died out 3 presidents ago.

[Skiiwee29]

As @Levent mentioned, personal experience and BIAS will play a huge part. As will each region since warranty enforcement and claims are different for each area. Personally I have had zero issues with any Asus item I've ever bought. Gigabyte, I refuse to use. EVGA use to be the king of everything (though they still had some bad PSUs in there lineup), but sadly they have now gone to just PSUs essentially at this point, which is a crying shame. 

[Jaw709]

6 minutes ago, Levent said:

Our thought process is defined by our past experiences.

 

People shit on GB motherboards, I like them and chose them over other brands due how reliable they have been for me. People don’t like Asus but their warranty is absolutely top notch in my country. I have had extremely bad experiences with MSI graphics cards and motherboards so even if they were the best I wouldn’t even consider them. 

 

 

TLDR, no universal answer here.

Yeah exactly true, no universal answer which is why I think it's an interesting probe into people's perception. I have had only good experience with my gigabyte board aswell, but I really never had any hardware fail on me believe it or not. Actually, there might have been an old Intel CPU when I was like 15 or so, but I'm an avid gamer and build my own rigs so I've touched a lot and gotten fairly lucky

 

[Jaw709]

5 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

As @Levent mentioned, personal experience and BIAS will play a huge part. As will each region since warranty enforcement and claims are different for each area. Personally I have had zero issues with any Asus item I've ever bought. Gigabyte, I refuse to use. EVGA use to be the king of everything (though they still had some bad PSUs in there lineup), but sadly they have now gone to just PSUs essentially at this point, which is a crying shame. 

What is the rationale behind never using gigabyte? I think this is what I'm getting at really- maybe the story behind why people have a built-in bias

[starsmine]

Generally there is nothing wrong with asus's quality.

The big issue with support is policies CHANGE. 
so does QC policies really. 

Asus did not used to have this reputation of bad support, its because the policy changed. so unfortunately our experiences in the past are not very telling of what would happen today. 

[Motifator]

EVGA's reign to be the king of all things they made, happened well over a decade ago. Their later era products spawned of trash motherboards like the X99 failures with garbage BIOS, and then the snake oil products like PCI noise reduction cards lol. I remember all of it, how they used to make great products then start sucking more and more day after day. Came to the point most of us would expected, their withdraw from the market...

however I'll add that there are some brands that always seem to release products that are sucky one way or another. Biostar is one that I have in mind, I had one of the X570 boards and the BIOS was a joke. Seemed like all those years haven't made them really progress. They tend to be known with a reputation of making cheap stuff.

[RONOTHAN##]

Personally, I've had terrible experiences with everyone and great experiences with everyone, so as far as I'm concerned, they're all about equal.

 

Some of the worst motherboards I've used are Gigabyte boards, but on the other hand I love the Z87X-OC I own and the X570 Master is the best AM4 motherboard I've used (and I've used a lot from every brand). The actual worst motherboard I used was the MSI X370 SLI Plus, that thing gave me nothing but issues and it was to the point where I swore off MSI for a time, but when I finally gave them another shot the Z690 Unify-X was very good. For ASRock, all of the ones I've used have been good, but I've also only ever bought their top of the line boards that are well reviewed, and have seen how utterly terrible some of their cheaper boards have been (though their newer boards have been pretty good, even on the low end). ASUS has also had a pretty big swing, where the older boards have been great (my first board was an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 that I absolutely loved, and the other DDR3 era boards I've used have all been great), while for their newer boards I tend to get annoyed at their BIOS and their newer boards have a bit of a lack of quality control (look up the Z690 and Z790 Apex issues, where the Z690 Apex were 50/50 whether one of the memory channels wouldn't boot over 6600MT/s despite being a board advertised at doing really well at memory overclocking, and the Z790 Apex would come bent and had a rather high DOA rate, at least initially). 

 

Most of what I buy is used, so I can't really comment about how good their warranty support is as I've never had to or even been able to use it. I'd like to think I don't really have any biases, though that's almost certainly not true. I do tend to avoid ASUS boards just for the fact that their BIOS tends to annoy me (it's the overly animated menus that make it kinda tough to navigate around there quickly), but seeing as my motherboard collection is about 35% ASUS at this point, that hasn't stopped me when they have produced an actually good motherboard. 

[Skiiwee29]

32 minutes ago, Jaw709 said:

What is the rationale behind never using gigabyte? I think this is what I'm getting at really- maybe the story behind why people have a built-in bias

In the Motherboards I've worked on for friends or personally owned, they've been the most unstable I've ever had. Simple things as the BIOS settings not saving (on the latest stable BIOS release for the boards) when you hit F10 and reboot. Does not fail to post or anything, just straight up wouldn't save any settings. Never used there PSUs, but there PSU debacle from a few years ago. Then when they got hacked, they lost most/all data for support/RMA claims etc and customers were SOL on warranty/RMA claims and were downright ghosted by months on end as a result. 

[kirashi]

1 hour ago, Jaw709 said:

What brands do you think have the best I guess perceived reputation for quality and reliability?

Depends entirely on the consumer. Brand loyalists might blindly purchase any product from certain brands, even if known problems exist. Skeptical consumers might perform countless hours of research to make an informed purchase. Ignorant consumers might buy whatever is recommended by someone else or whatever is cheapest, then act irrationally when it breaks or otherwise fails to live up to their expectations.

 

The only universal truths here are: buyer beware, do your research, and know that all manufacturers are susceptible to pumping out hot garbage (on purpose or by accident) in the name of capitalist profits.

[Jaw709]

20 minutes ago, kirashi said:

Depends entirely on the consumer. Brand loyalists might blindly purchase any product from certain brands, even if known problems exist. Skeptical consumers might perform countless hours of research to make an informed purchase. Ignorant consumers might buy whatever is recommended by someone else or whatever is cheapest, then act irrationally when it breaks or otherwise fails to live up to their expectations.

 

The only universal truths here are: buyer beware, do your research, and know that all manufacturers are susceptible to pumping out hot garbage (on purpose or by accident) in the name of capitalist profits.

But you are a people, what do you think based on your experiences?

[PowerPCFan]

1 hour ago, Jaw709 said:

What is the rationale behind never using gigabyte? I think this is what I'm getting at really- maybe the story behind why people have a built-in bias

Yeah I agree, I've had great experiences with Gigabyte but I wonder why others hate them

[Jaw709]

27 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

In the Motherboards I've worked on for friends or personally owned, they've been the most unstable I've ever had. Simple things as the BIOS settings not saving (on the latest stable BIOS release for the boards) when you hit F10 and reboot. Does not fail to post or anything, just straight up wouldn't save any settings. Never used there PSUs, but there PSU debacle from a few years ago. Then when they got hacked, they lost most/all data for support/RMA claims etc and customers were SOL on warranty/RMA claims and were downright ghosted by months on end as a result. 

Nice thank you for the insight. I had that same issue with not saving the BIOS settings after reboot, but I determined that the "advanced CPU settings" were overriding the duplicate settings in AMD CBS. Otherwise it has performed as well as I expected it to except the CPU voltages are by default set pretty high

[Poinkachu]

I probably have bias against Biostar ngl

[da na]

HP, Hitachi, PNY, XFX. 

PNY is the only one who still makes consistently good hardware unfortunatel (or still makes the hardware I'm in the market for in the first place), but with my older hardware those four have given me the best experience hands-down. 2007-2010 HP Pavilion series and the accompanying accessories are really nicely designed and built, XFX's motherboards and GeForce cards were absolutely incredible, and Hitachi HDDs never disappoint.

By extension of liking HP, I must also like Asus since the're the OEM for 60% of HP products from 2005-2010 era.

From my findings, a lot of the Japanese laptops are unfortunately utter trash. Fujitsu and Toshiba notebooks all seem to be poorly designed slabs of cheap plastic and that's disappointing - the hardware inside is decent if they'd bother to cool it well and put it in a good case.

[da na]

4 minutes ago, PowerPCFan said:

Yeah I agree, I've had great experiences with Gigabyte but I wonder why others hate them

Only had good motherboards and video cards from them, but that exploding PSU fiasco was not great

1 minute ago, Poinkachu said:

I probably have bias against Biostar ngl

Not sure anyone who has used their boards doesn't

[Skiiwee29]

2 minutes ago, Jaw709 said:

Nice thank you for the insight. I had that same issue with not saving the BIOS settings after reboot, but I determined that the "advanced CPU settings" were overriding the duplicate settings in AMD CBS. Otherwise it has performed as well as I expected it to except the CPU voltages are by default set pretty high

Literally the only thing I would change would be enabling XMP in the BIOS, thats it. Nothing else. 

[Skiiwee29]

2 minutes ago, Poinkachu said:

I probably have bias against Biostar ngl

is BioStar sill the OEM for NZXTs motherboards?

[Poinkachu]

10 minutes ago, da na said:

HP, Hitachi, PNY, XFX. 

PNY is the only one who still makes consistently good hardware unfortunatel (or still makes the hardware I'm in the market for in the first place), but with my older hardware those four have given me the best experience hands-down. 2007-2010 HP Pavilion series and the accompanying accessories are really nicely designed and built, XFX's motherboards and GeForce cards were absolutely incredible, and Hitachi HDDs never disappoint.

Makes me remember the one time I bought a PNY thumbdrive for an acquintance.

It died within 4 months while rarely used. That embarassed me a lot

 

I know i know, it's just an Thumbdrive.., just that that was the first "expensive" thumbdrive I ever "bought" and the first ever that died in such a short time

That acquintance helped me a lot in the past, and he considers me knowledgeable about tech stuff.

So... yea. Took me awhile until I start considering PNY stuffs again after that.

 

9 minutes ago, da na said:

Not sure anyone who has used their boards doesn't

 

8 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

is BioStar sill the OEM for NZXTs motherboards?

Honestly i have no idea, NZXT's MB isn't available in my country.

I sure hope not.

 

Pretty much me when a friend mentions about using biostar stuffs

[Jaw709]

6 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Literally the only thing I would change would be enabling XMP in the BIOS, thats it. Nothing else. 

Meh to each his/her own. A lot of OC is the same as XMP where the hardware can support higher, but get sold with limitations either for an abundance of caution or price-point marketing. For example, the phenom ii line is a prime example where four, even six core CPUs were sold with disabled cores.

 

Ironically or fittingly, ASUS boards did the consumers a solid and had the core unlocking tool. First and easiest OC I ever did. I hope they can return to that kind of consumer-empowering practice and I think they will find renewed marketshare

[kirashi]

27 minutes ago, Jaw709 said:

But you are a people, what do you think based on your experiences?

I fall into the skeptical / informed consumer category. There are some brands I trust more than others, like Logitech, Dell, Lenovo, HPE, Fuji Heavy Industries (SubuWu), Toyota, Sony, Penguin Random House (the publisher), just to name a few, but that trust is NEVER, EVER blind. All the aforementioned companies have manufactured or products HAWT GARBAGE, some of which are detrimental to the very existence of the human species and our planet.

 

For me, it really boils down to researching a given product line / series prior to purchase, combined with talking to a company's support department to see how they handle issues that might arise. No company is immune, and some fail horribly at doing right by the consumer. Those who make it right end up in my good books. Everyone else either doesn't (yet) have a place in my good books, or has already been added to my "never do business with" blacklist.

[Godlygamer23]

As already stated, a lot of people's answers are going to be based on their own experiences, and that will be driven by specific aspects of the company, based on the location they're ultimately dealing with. The reality is is that every company has defective products, and has to deal with warranty claims, whether it's because of defects that they created themselves, either by part selection(cheapness) or quality control(manufacturing process), or because their suppliers(PCBs, capacitors, ICs, etc) sold them parts that had defects across some portion of the lot, or the entire lot. 

 

A huge part of this as well is how companies react to RMAs. If they get enough of them within a specific range(say within a specific date code, or serial number range), then the proper reaction is to stop production and/or issue a recall, depending on where they're at within their production run.

 

I myself have purchased motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock, but they were over a fairly long span of time, with low quantities, so my sample size is simply too low. I did have one ASUS card die on me because of a blown capacitor(outside of warranty, and I was using it for Folding@home), but the other one continued to function. I've also had video cards from Gigabyte, EVGA, Zotac, etc that have continued to function. My Intel 520 series SSD(240GB) has been extremely reliable as well, showing no signs of failure whatsoever. Based on the data that I've found about the longevity of the NAND(and based on my approximate calculations based on information shown in CDI), this drive will last longer than I'll be alive for - based on that alone, it'll survive several computing eras before it dies, assuming other components continue to function.

 

 

Edited May 19 by Godlygamer23
Added additional product experience.

[Middcore]

Somebody has a "I'll never buy from those MF'ers ever again" story for every single major brand. 

[Brian McKee]

I've seen more dead Gigabyte cards than any other brand, but ymmv. But my friends call it "Gigashit" for a reason.