My father few years ago was working with various motherboards, CPUs and chipsets and he was certain that everything non-Intel will sooner or later suck, everything non-Gigabyte will work for a bit then die or have no drivers. He installed/repaired at least 100 computers at that time. Though I have to repeat that it was few years ago so cheap manufacturer today probably uses better capacitors and motherboards don't die today. Few years ago such thing made a difference between dead/unstable motherboard and working one. I still have to remind that most testing in magazines/websites is really short if you consider lifetime of a motherboard. Around 80-90% of people testing for such magazines have no electronic education to really assess the quality of basic things. ASUS is good today but I still remember times when they weren't exactly reliable. Asrock might be stable enough and fine today but I saw most unstable computers build on it. Totally Intel motherboards required no recommendation - they just worked. Gigabyte was close to Intel quality. MSI turned into MBs for ricers. Truth is that statistic samples you get from helping few friends or repairing your stuff aren't meaningful. You might be simply unlucky. Once upon a time I bought MSI/Ali motherboard and it was weirdest one of all: Windows Millenium worked better than 98 or 2000 on it and it was actually quite stable. While everyone else whined about ME I just played games.
I will grudgingly agree its possible that I have had bad luck with Gigabyte. My hate is due to them burning my brand loyalty to them. I used to love the boards... they did seem to have high quality + all the things I wanted in the boards. Its just the last couple of boards I got from them are utter crap its turned me off from them for a while.
I wonder what boards have let you down in particular and if you bought them all at the same time or even together. My ep45-ud3lr is fine as I said before...
Oh and did I mention the director of my local library to get the xkcd book? I saw it sitting on display in the new section and was like "fucking win".
two of the boards I got were GA-p35c-ds3r one for me and one for a friend. Ya its dated now considering there are now on x58's and the z68's. I got a different board a year ago... duno what it was... we changed it for something else when it was being a piece of shit.
Didn't have any probs with win ME at all, if I remember correctly I had a ASROCK MB at that time, granted I wouldn't have minded to stay on win 98 for a year or 5 longer. Asus used to suck hard, almost harder then ASROCK, but it's now producing a variety of rather stable MBs. Never liked gigabyte to be honest, dunno why. :p As for MSI, I remember these boards to be rather pricy.
I used to be a solid Soyo MB fan up until they filed chapter 7 and never came out of it(collapsed). They made the most solid, and OC'able MB's I have ever had the pleasure of using.
