Intel controls so much about what's on a motherboard these days that there's really not much difference between most boards at all any more.
You're looking at less than 5% performance difference between any of them.
The only real differences are with serious overclocking boards that are designed for breaking records on LN2.
As a general user, you won't see a difference in performance or overclockability; at most it will be +/- 100MHz between the high end boards and the cheap ones when you're putting a reasonable amount of voltage into the chips.
Features are really the only differentiators now, with some boards adding WiFi, some using a cheaper third-party NIC rather than the Intel one, bluetooth, thunderbolt support etc.
ASUS are generally a good brand to go for as far as reliability is concerned, but I can't help feeling burned after their P67 boards.
I have a Sabertooth P67, and none of their P67 boards will wake from sleep properly when paired with a Corsair AX Gold power supply. (I have an AX850)
It's an issue that neither ASUS nor Corsair are willing to admit fault with, and ASUS just told me they would keep RMA'ing the board for me (the Sabertooth has a 5 year warranty) but I've had four of them now and there's no difference. The reason it's four is because I got two bad boards from them - with the first, something was broken and the CPU was locked to the minimum multiplier at all times - BIOS updates, disabling power management settings etc. did nothing, so my 2500K was locked at 1.6GHz. The second board exhibited the sleep issues mentioned, so I RMA'd it without success. The third board had dead USB3 ports, and I'm using the fourth now.
It does seem to be an issue with the motherboard though, because some people with different ASUS P67 boards that give additional voltage options found that bumping up one of the RAM voltages slightly fixed things so that it would wake from sleep correctly, rather than wake and immediately reboot. But ASUS weren't willing to unlock those options for people with boards that didn't have the option.
But I have spectacularly bad luck with electronics so while that sounds bad, it might not be anything to be concerned about.
I've also had enough failures with Macs over the years that I have essentially had three free upgrades from them, because there were so many failures and faulty repairs. (three or four failures and they generally replace the machine - though my iMac had six before that was replaced) That may sound good, but I was without the machines for weeks at a time, probably months in total over all of them. At least with a PC I can just walk into a store, buy a new motherboard the same day, and RMA the faulty board, rather than be without the system. (at least that's the plan if anything else goes wrong now)
My 1 month old Benchmark DAC2 is back at the place I bought it from right now too. So things going wrong with those ASUS boards I had does not necessarily mean they're unreliable.
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Topic: Suggest a mobo for my 3rd Gen Intel Core i7-3770 (Read 3368 times)