I'm more concerned about negative reviews..... peeps open the box, build the machine, it goes on .... 5 egg review. One other thing to keep in mind is the reviewers mind set. Remember that you have a lot of different outlooks of folks when selecting products. Suburu used to advertise that JD Power survey said they have the highest customer satisfaction rating. But my thought was, they when somebody drops $70k on a car, they tend to be a bit more discriminating / "picky" then somebody who buys one for $14k. Also more features and options means more things can go wrong.
In this market segment, price is usually the over riding factor above all others so "the cheapest" MoBo will often be the most purchased MoBo. When you sell for less, you have to cut costs somewhere and with labor, marketing, transportation costs somewhat fixed, the main opportunity to cut costs is in component purchasing
Although Asrock has come a long way, let's remember that Asrock was created by Asus as a means to market low budget products to system builders w/o killing Asus' "enthusiast" reputation. As one might expect, low budget means lower quality components. In the early years, they offered only 1 and sometimes 2 year warrantees, the boards were vert thin, they had a bunch bursting / bleeding cap issues and so on.
Once they were spun off by Asus, like most electronic companies, they figured they could make more money by going after all markets rather than just the low end. They have done quite well, we now see 3 year warrantees, we see better products but they never cut ties with their original; suppliers. At the low - lower mid price range, I am still a bit wary as boxes have been brought in and I felt the boards were a bit thin / flimsy and one of the reasons why two of them had been damaged by the installation of the Hyper 212 (1155 / and 1156 models). I also had one on a budget Asus board.
There is, at present, again some kind of tie in between Asus and Asrock. All of the communications for the RMA of my Asus WS Motherboard were from Pegatron who is Asrock's parent company. So given the "early days" and the more recent 1155 / 1156 experiences, I'm still a little bit "gun shy" of the brand.....tho my concerns are more centered on the low - mid priced boards. At the mid to high priced range, they seem to compete well and are always "in the running", but after considering features, component quality, reviews, aesthetics and price, they just haven't come out on top among peeps we've built for. From 2000 to 2012, almost all of our builds were Asus.... since then MSI and Gigabyte have been the most popular.
Gigabyte has long been recognized for great power delivery and hardy design as was mentioned above by madchemist. Their products are oft bland looking however and their BIOS needs a lot of work to get rid of it's last decade look and feel. MSI, a brand that I never looked at 5-6 years ago, has really surged in quality the last 2-3 generations, not that they are incapable of dropping a stinker (i.e. Z97 Krait) every now and then.
One concern is that newegg hasn't had stock for a while on 2 of the 3 boards and is listing the "This item is currently out of stock and it may or may not be restocked." message. Never like buying EoL (end of life) products.
I don't do many H97 builds, to my eyes the cost savings just isn't worth what you give up, so I must admit to being a lot less knowledgeable to the H97 options cause I haven't spent as much time looking at them and I have conversed with very few folks who have them. But in applying the usual weight factors, MSI and Giga look better to my eyes. OTOH, the newer H170 iTX boards will drop soon and if ya wait till November, the prices should drop to $100 and below.
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