My take: these were, unfortunate, parts failures. In an analysis of the failure these things are not part of the problem: the brand of board; whether it was being over clocked or not; finally the QC is not a likely a factor, either. Catastrophic failures like these are rare. Most likely the fault was in a part of the regulator circuit, which consists of an integrated regulator chip, an inductor, a few capacitors and a few resistors. No load fault (ie, short circuit, thermal overload, or undervoltage should cause a failure in such regulator circuits. It may be possible it is a board problem (trace being next to a noisy one, inducing some perturbation in regulation, or possibly a condition where a trace opened (which, with a loaded regulator passing a lot of current, the flyback can cause a catastrophic failure like that. It could have been a pin not making good connection in the socket. The point being, it isn't related to brand or quality so much. It may be vendor related. It could be from so many possible things, only a failure analysis will find the route cause. I believe it takes an electronics engineer to determine that. The shame is, I have never heard the feedback from any company on what the route cause was of such catastrophic failure.
I had an inductor blow on a phase on an ASRock X58 board recently. A replacement board is still working fine months later. Psychologically I would naturally be wary of buying the same brand and model of anything that failed that way; logically, I know better. I've worked with power conversion circuits for over 30 years. Some failure just happen; the root cause is never found, despite thousands of other identical circuits that never fail in service.
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