Everyone has an opinion. For me, after having built complete, enclosed-case systems with Asus, Gigabyte and ASRock, I can say I am never going back to Asus or Gigabyte.
As I had intended it to be my main everyday rig, the Asus P8Z68V Pro Gen 3 was the most expensive 1155 board I bought at the time I got it, but I quickly learned that their BIOS is simply third-rate, which may be an insult to third-raters. Can you believe that for the money they charge, these geniuses didn't even see fit to offer a shortcut to a boot menu? Even Gigabyte with its cheesy looking BIOS of old had a keyboard shortcut to simply access a boot menu. But not Asus. You have to go through their BIOS every time. That's poor conception and design. The antithesis of customer satisfaction. That makes it an "F" board and Mobo brand for me.
Gigabyte is treated like a religion at this website, ostensibly because of its native Power Management support. But I've had two Gigabyte boards that were fails right out of the box, another that was so poorly designed when I started putting it together that I took it back. And their first H77 board was a complete joke, with audio and network codecs no one else uses. And another that had faulty RAM slots right out of the box, too. I gave them a fair shot. But Gigabyte is off my list as well.
ASRock was at once a lower-priced option to those two, but now its prices have crept up. I've had real good success with their H67 boards, not quite as stellar with the H77, say 80-85% success rate, and a little worse on their Z77 boards. But their BIOS is easily the best out there of the boards I've tried. As far as power management, it works on some of their boards, not on others. Just like every other board maker.
