Budget End Motherboard Questions

[Philcat101]

1. I have heard about bad ASRock customer service, and I have cowered away from their boards. I have also heard that the boars are DOA a lot. Are these reasons valid enough to stay away from their motherboards entirely?

2. What are the bare necessities for a mobo? I have seen "Solid Capacitors" and "Humidity Safe PCB's", but are those standards now a days?

3. What are the 2 best motherboard brands for the low end?

4. Please tell me anything you think is relevant and useful.

 

Thanks!

[Enderman]

you can get very good asus motehrboards for $100-150 that have a ton of features, the best UEFI, and very good quality

they sell the most motherboards out of every company

[Lotus]

1) They're not true. ASrock is a fine board manufacturer just like any other. In fact, the only board partners you should stay away from is ECS and Biostar.

2) The bare necessities for a mobo are: beefy enough VRMs to supply power to the CPU, and that's it. Everything else is extra. Hell, an h81 chipset motherboard can still run a Xeon E3 1231 just fine. So long as the power delivery is there, you're good.

3) Best brands? No such thing. They're all pretty much repackaging the same stuff with a different bios.

4) Focus on what you need and no more. If you don't need overclocking, you won't need a Z chipset board, and so on. Unless you're overclocking, with how fast DDR4 is an i5-6500 on an h110 board with a single stick of DDR4 is a great budget solution. The memory bandwidth is still high thanks to DDR4 yet thanks to the open DIMM you have room for expansion. Overclocking isn't necessary on the locked i5, and it supports your GPU just fine.

[That_Random_Guy]

Idk why all the hate on asrock. currently running their x99x killer and have better luck with them rather than other companies like msi and gigabyte. and had a failure asus board. Though its funny you people hate asrock and love asus when they were technically the same company at 1 time.

[Imakuni]

1. I have heard about bad ASRock customer service, and I have cowered away from their boards. I have also heard that the boars are DOA a lot. Are these reasons valid enough to stay away from their motherboards entirely?

2. What are the bare necessities for a mobo? I have seen "Solid Capacitors" and "Humidity Safe PCB's", but are those standards now a days?

3. What are the 2 best motherboard brands for the low end?

4. Please tell me anything you think is relevant and useful.

 

Thanks!

1. I hear ASUS has bad customer service, not Asrock. Also, they're boards are just as good as any other (except ECS, which is worse than everything).
2. Uh... does it have all the features you need? For example, USB headers, Sata Ports, SLI, OC support.... you name what YOU need, not the other way around. Modern mobos all contain the bare minimums to run every CPU available for their sockets, so everything else is an extra.
3. The 2 that have the best mix of price and features. Duh. Personally, I find GA mobos ugly, I don't like red (aka RIP MSI). Asus also tends to lack features at the same price as others. And Asrock is what I use, so......
4. If you liked this answer, do that thing, and if you don't....... COME ON!!!! 

[JebKerman]

From my understanding as a very very general rule regarding consumer grade boards it goes ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS. but as I said it's very general and it will tend to vary from board to board, not manufacturer to manufacturer.

 

Asrocks cheapest boards to tend to be the cheapest of all. but from what I've heard there is somewhat of a reason for it. for budget boards i would generally go with the other members of the big 4. or just for a not-rock-bottom ASRock one.

 

the main things in a motherboard is headers, and power delivery. Headers is fairly obvious, does it have as many as you need?, and power delivery will almost always be fine if you don't overclock.