I used to use asrock many moons ago but I stopped and switched to Asus and Gigabyte, the odd MSI here and there. Are Asrock any good yet? They seem to do quite a few different models that offer more features than some of the Asus/Gigabyte equivalent.
I've always been a fan of ASRock, though because of their more niche boards (mobile and SFF) having not used their "gaming" boards. I've used Asus, Gigabyte and MSI as well over the years, and hold ASRock in similar regard. What are you concerned about about - reliability, overclocking, features, looks?
Quality, stability of the BIOS (UEFI nowadays). Might give Asrock a try then, they do seem to have more features than some of the same boards at the price range my only real concern was the quality of components and stability, oh and driver support? And if their website sucks balls and is down every time I need it (Gigabyte, had to use .tw and translate).
Their site is better than Asus and Gigabyte in my experience, which is to say... it's not terrible. The site, documentation and software does have a whiff of "lost in translation" about it on occasion, but I've never found that to get in the way too much, just means things like "multi channel audio" might be described as "many concurrent sound stream experience"
How old will that board be? My experience is they seem alright at the start and then die after 2 or so years . Need something that is gonna last 3+.
I just splurged on one of their motherboards... though one of the 'niche' models for my home server re-rebuild. Picked up the ASROCK E3C224D4I-14S RT. While a bit spendy, it has a really nice feature set especially with the 4 dimm slots and onboard SAS in a more or less flex form factor. Unfortunately... either the motherboard or CPU (basic Pentium G3220, since the board was so much I priced myself out of buying anything else for the moment LOL) is defective as I can't get it to post. Waiting on an RMA, hopefully will have better luck on the replacement.
Asrock are great value boards in my experience. There's a lot of talk as to whether they are a spin-off from ASUS (I never got to the bottom of it), but either way, they are generally reliable and inexpensive.
Not a bad board and would be ideal for what I have in mind, I had a quick scan and couldn't see one in the UK, what did it cost you in dollars?
My experiences are different. H77 Pro4/MVP was fine up until i upgraded my brothers PC to ITX mobo; at the moment of pull (maybe 2-3 months ago) it was 100%, i heard no complaints abouyt it. A 3 year old Z68M-ITX/HT (there were many complaints about this board throttling all the time for higher end CPU) is still working fine in mom's mini PC. And i am pretty sure pretty much anything since Sandy Bridge generation from ASRock is going to be rock solid (maybe with the exception of poor boards like that Z68 which was simply not equipped for a quadcore in first place). The Z97 Extreme6 i bought after Haswell Refresh last year also works without issues with an i5-4460, running 24/7 since.
I've got an asrock extreme6 z77 board that my friend had owned since the things had come out. Still going strong.
Never had a problem with Asrock boards in terms of reliability. They always seem to come out with interesting niche designs too, like a heterogenous dual-socket board (754 and 939), or an LGA2011-3 ITX board.
I've had a fair few Asrock boards, been happy with them, as you say they do have some niceties about them without being overly priced.
They are a spin off from ASUS, but that was a long time ago (2002). Then in 2010, they were bought by Pegatron- a monster electronics conglomerate in Taiwan. I prefer Gigabyte but have used ASRock boards in several builds with no complaints.
ASUS made ASRock to fight Foxconn. ASUS then split into ASUS and Pegatron (for OEM market) and sold ASRock to Pegatron. Because after that ASRock wasn't limited by "non-competing clausule" against highend ASUS, they ventured into the high end board market too.
