Lots of you are recommending Asus boards. I for one won't touch their motherboards with a ten foot pole. They're overpriced compared to the competition (spec-wise) and both performance and reliability are hit and miss. Their top of the line offerings do perform well, but a large part of the top-end boards I've sold come back for RMA. I've had 2 maximus x boards come back with a broken PCI-E slot - apparently Asus didn't bother soldering all 3 of the retaining clips to the PCB and the weight of the owner's video cards made the slot's cover detach from the motherboard, while the pins remained soldered in place. I do love their UEFI design and functionality tough. I've also had returns on Asus Z370 strix boards due to faulty LGA socket locking mechanisms.
Their video cards are even worse - at least the ones using AMD GPUs. I owned a couple of Asus R9 280x (DirectCU II) cards in the past - both started to freeze the system after a few months of use - turns out the video bios was poorly set up and the board's cooling did not properly accommodate the power delivery circuits - that caused them to overheat (temps over 110C) and deliver unstable current. They were both fixed with a modified bios witch dropped the clocks from 1050 to 1000Mhz on the core and upped the vcore a bit - that kept the VRMs from going over 100C in typical usage scenarios. A permanent fix would have been a better cooler. The trend continues with my Asus ROG STRIX Vega64 Gamig OC - alltough a custom designed board, it will not go over 1600MHz. In fact in most cases it hovers around 1550mhz - witch is a really poor clock speed for a custom board. On the other hand, the Frontier Edition Vega64 I picked up off a miner a couple of days ago can go as high as 1700MHz on it's shitty blower style cooler... Asus have really gone down the loo in the last 4-5 years. I haven't owned any nvidia cards made by Asus (I usually stick to Zotac, EVGA or MSI for nvidia cards), maybe those are better. They make
good great gaming laptops (stay away from their entry level stuff tough, it's pure garbage) and decent monitors, but that's where I draw the line.
In fact no company makes great products all across their product line...
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Gigabyte - excellent hardware, poor UEFI design and implementation. Hard to navigate and limited options even on some higher end boards. Sometimes overclocking just doesn't work as well as on competitive board. They are pretty reliable boards tough, and are the best value/reliability in my country. They do have a knack of using higher end components and chipsets on low or low-mid end boards - like the GA-AB350M-DS3H. One would thing it's a b350 board right? Well it's not. It's in fact a budget x370 chipset implementation:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-AB350M-DS3H-rev-1x#sp
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Biostar - make the best low-end boards I've ever used. Bios isn't bad either. I use their boards whenever I have to sell larger volumes of budget computers. Very few (if any) RMA requests. Their high-end boards aren't bad either - great OC performance, even on AMD platforms, good UEFI implementation and good build quality - the only problem is price. Biostar's flagship boards cost as much (if not more) then an equivalent Asrock or Gigabyte product with the same specs. They're boards are also kind of "chinese" looking (design-wise) and it puts people off.
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MSI - great high-end boards and decent reliability - although they've made some questionable design choices with their latest flagship products. It seems to me they're trying to pass off cost cutting methods as advances or features (talking about their suspicious dual VRMs in particular). Overclocking on their mid-end products is hit and miss. Their high-end stuff is great but hard to come by where I live -and rather expensive. Their mid-range boards are kind of crap - stay away from them. They're low end boars are also great - simple and well priced, good build quality and decent reliability.
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Asrock - excellent high-end boards, and best value/performance/features over anything on the market today. Not the greatest overclockers tough, although they have the hardware for it, some boards simply don't OC as well as they shroud. Asrock is pretty consistent across all their product lineup - so you can't really ever go wrong when buying an asrock board, be it low end or a flagship model.
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EVGA - great product line - probably the best performance + reliability out of the lot - but also the most expensive by far (at least where I'm from), and they limit themselves to intel platforms. Nowadays most uses want* an AMD rig (2600 and 1600x are my best sellers by a huge margin) and EVGA will only make intel and nvidia products. Their loss.
*most of my clients value price/performance over anything else - so they'll only stretch their budget so far. AMD offers 6 cores and 12 theards + motherboard + wraith cooler for 270-310$ while an intel core i5 9600k (cpu alone) is ~300$.
