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.
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.