Skyscraper wrote:

sgraffite wrote:

I've never had any motherboards die on me that were connected to an UPS, except my EVGA SR-2 which my Corsair cooler leaked on.

Now I'm suddenly happy I never got to water cooling my main SR-2 system although I bought watercooling gear for it back in 2011!

I hope you took that Corsair cheap piece of crap water cooler outside and used it for target practise!

It actually fried the SR-2 mobo and a ASUS DirectCU II GTX 670 video card. Corsair support was awesome though. I sent them the failed cooler and broken hardware to inspect and they sent me a check for the value of the hardware plus a new Corsair H100i cooler. I ended up upgrading to an ASUS dual socket 2011 system as SR-2's were becoming hard to find then and both coolers have been working just fine for the last two years.

I really like the closed loop coolers because they are reusable and super quiet.

I usually buy whatever CRAP is on sale at Frys at the time.

Boards still working: msi, ecs, asus

Boards dead: soyo, albatron, as rock

I must have gotten lucky to not have specific board manufacturers give me trouble with their hardware (yes, that includes the notorious PC Chips). As a matter of fact, I've got a small Socket 1155 build in which I have a used ASUS P8H61-M LX3 R2.0 (which had been yanked out of a computer and thrown in a box with other motherboards), and aside from a broken screwpost on the integrated VGA output and a number of bent pins on the socket (I seriously thought this board was f-ed as a result), the motherboard actually works after having bent back the bad pins. My old Core 2 Duo build from 2007 (which now runs on a Core 2 Quad Q6600) still works using an ASUS P5B-VM motherboard, but is limited to a measly 4GB of RAM (any higher and Windows will BSOD on startup) and seems to be running much slower than it did when it had Windows XP installed (it's now running Windows 10). As I mentioned before, my only somewhat problematic ASUS product is my G750JW laptop, which is my portable editing/video capture station/data center (dual 1TB hard drives on this sucker), and every time I have to render a video, the CPU runs stupid hot, peaking at 97 degrees C and going into thermal throttling as a result. Can't say that's very reassuring for me and it's why I now use an HP Workstation Z420 desktop instead to save the CPU from this obscene heat buildup. Whether it's bad cooling design or poor thermal conductivity between the CPU and heatsink, I can't say. All I know is the GPU sucks (GTX765M, gets its ass handed to it by a desktop GTX570).
In relation to my previous question regarding Z170 motherboards, does anybody have one to recommend with both Crossfire and SLI support, robust VRM circuitry for overclocking (this is for later when I need to give the Core i7 6700K a bit of a performance boost), has an ALC1150 audio chipset and won't break the bank (no more than $250CA)? Also, is there anything inherently wrong with motherboards that use Apaq capacitors?

I think no brand has a perfect reputation. I happen to favor Asus boards for the simple reason that they gave me very very few problems and i have a lot of Asus boards. I have a lot of boards coming in and out of my house through the years and i simply do not like Msi for example. By far the worst in my experience as a lot of boards simply were dead or dying. A lot of people like them so they must have some good products but i have no faith in them.

It is all about personal experience i guess. Some people hate VW's, i like em. Some people love Renault's, i hate them.

I have not had any bad experiences with Asus boards. Sinces the late 90's I have built computers with Epox, Abit, Intel and Asus motherboards. The first three have disappeared or stopped making motherboards, so in my current build I have used an Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 board.

It has been rock stable with only a few compatibility issues which were quickly fixed by BIOS updates.