It's funny, ASRock went from a company I'd never fucking heard of to one of the top names in the space. I used to be like "what's this no-name brand?" and now I'm like "Oh ASRock, I know them."
Unrelated, I miss the old Gigabyte Dual BIOS, where it had a backup BIOS in case the default got corrupted. Which mine did, a lot.
it was spun-off from asus in '02, then acquired by a different spin-off in '10 which asus retains significant ownership of. so, yea, basically asrock is their "discount" brand,
+1 for MSI. I've bought GPUs from them for 10+ years and never once had a failure or even a minor issue. Got a lot of mileage out of the GTX 1080 I bought in 2016.
Oof, my MSI 1080 died after allmost six years of service.
My first hardware death in 20 years of building my own systems, other than a drive.
Can’t blame them for it. It truly did its job, so I went with them again for my 3080.
I liked ASrock when they were in the ECS tier of quirky and weird. Got a Socket 939 board with the ULi M1695 chipset that was really nifty.
Then I had an awful experience with an AM3 board that claimed to run a FX-8350, until they edited their support list.
I grudgingly chose them for AM5 because it was $50 cheaper for the featured I wanted, and it's been okay, aside from me breaking the x16 slot clip due to hamfistedly removing a shipping-container sized GPU.
Glad you brought up ECS. Not good for high-end computing, but really stable for low-end. I have a customer with an Athlon64 box I built them in a pinch almost 20 years ago now that just runs a POS system, and it's never caused him a single problem. Sometimes budget minded brands work in a pinch. ECS is not super well known, but always been great with customer service and advance RMA replacements. I wouldn't call their hardware super sturdy in some cases though.