Only Rules I have for brands is I ignore anything that says PC Chips or E-Machine if it says either of those items I take it out back, throw gasoline on it and burn it, and watch as the evil spirits leave

I agree 100% with the brand policy described in the first post. Moreover, I have almost the same preferred brands! 😀
My list:
motherboards and all possible accessories - ASUS
CPUs - Intel
RAM - Kingston
VGA - 3dfx, Quantum3D, ASUS of all kinds till V9999GT
sound - here we do have variety, but my true love goes to Gravis and Aureal

I think I'm more brand-crazy with newer stuff. Corsair case, Corsair PSU, Corsair memory, Corsair closed-loop CPU cooler, Corsair thumb drive. For motherboards it's either MSI or Asus. For SSDs I only go with Samsung (830, 840, 850). For processors I'm all Intel. For video cards I'm all nVidia (my GTX1070 Strix OC arrives today!!).

For older stuff, I'm all over the place.

hard1k wrote:

I agree 100% with the brand policy described in the first post. Moreover, I have almost the same preferred brands! :) My list: m […]
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I agree 100% with the brand policy described in the first post. Moreover, I have almost the same preferred brands! 😀
My list:
motherboards and all possible accessories - ASUS
CPUs - Intel
RAM - Kingston
VGA - 3dfx, Quantum3D, ASUS of all kinds till V9999GT
sound - here we do have variety, but my true love goes to Gravis and Aureal

With cpu's there is a difference as i really like my k6-3+ and also like the cyrix 486 (unfortunately i only have a Cyrix 100gp so i run a amd 5x86@150mhz). Intel ofcourse makes great cpu's so every single pentium etc. i use too.
I never use Ebay but still managed to find almost everything i wanted but with ram i can't be that picky. Kingston would be among favorites but i am just glad i got all the types of ram.

Creative sound for me is just the basics, when starting a game i want it to work. I don't care about midi, don't know what a hanging note bug is and never loaded a soundfont! 🤣 😎
So no need to go ''fancy'' on soundcards for me. I like the looks of the Awe32 and Awe64 Gold but otherwise they are just soundblaster16's for me 🤣

I have a lot of 3dfx cards but nothing Quantum3D. I don't think that stuff was even sold over here so i don't think i will ever come across it.

Artex wrote:

I think I'm more brand-crazy with newer stuff. Corsair case, Corsair memory, Corsair closed-loop CPU cooler, Corsair thumb drive. For motherboards it's either MSI or Asus. For SSDs I only go with Samsung (830, 840, 850). For processors I'm all Intel. For video cards I'm all nVidia (my GTX1070 Strix OC arrives today!!).

For older stuff, I'm all over the place.

Asus, Intel,Corsair mem/psu, samsung ssd i agree, Geforce/Radeon i care less as they both served me well. In pci-e i went 7800gt, x1900xtx, 8800gts, HD4890, HD5870, GTX580, R9 290 so it is very evenly balanced between the brands 🤣

With older stuff when i go ''all over the place'' i very soon have no space left. I already have way too much so i have to keep myself in check a bit.

Not particularly brand crazy, but I do find myself rooting for the underdog. I do have a favorite brand tough, and that's Abit. I used to like Asus, but after several disappointments, I try to avoid them, especially current products (worse customer support and RMA I've ever had to deal with) as well as late 2000 - early 2005 mainboards. Earlier asus boards are mediocre in both performance and reliability (outclassed by abit in the slot 1 era and outclassed by the likes of biostar in the 486 era) and modern products are hit and miss - some are great (like my old Asus ROG G751JY) some are crap (like my T100TAL), and when it goes south you have to deal with horrible customer support, so I'd rather save me a headache and buy Asrock or MSI (depending on budget). My first choice for modern motherboards would be high-end Biostar models, but they don't import them in my country witch is a real shame, since all modern(ish) biostar boards I used were extremely rugged, reliable, surprisingly fast and had great features - and they have been pretty consistent quality-wise throughout the years

Soundcard wise I grab everything I can find: creative, yamaha, gravis ultrasound, you name it. As for video cards, I like both ATi / AMD and nVidia, but I have a thing for 3DFX. I like both AMD and Intel CPUs, but have a fetish for Cyrix stuff, especially socket 3 and 386 era CPUs. For ram I prefer OCZ and Corsair, but there's a lot of good RAM brands like Kingston (their HyperX series is pretty good), A-Data (Vitesta series was great and their SSDs are cheap, fast and reliable) and so on.

kanecvr wrote:

Not particularly brand crazy, but I do find myself rooting for the underdog. I do have a favorite brand tough, and that's Abit. I used to like Asus, but aftter seveal dissapointments, I try to avoid them, especially current products (worse customer support and RMA I've ever had to deal with) as well as late 2000 - early 2005 mainboards.

Soundcard wise I grab everything I can find: creative, yamaha, gravis ultrasound, you name it. As for video cards, I like both ATi / AMD and nVidia, but I have a thing for 3DFX. I like both AMD and Intel CPUs, but have a fetish for Cyrix stuff, especially socket 3 and 386 era CPUs.

I think 2000-2005 was poor nomatter what brand. The capacitor plague was there ofcourse but computers also sold like hotcakes and not everything was up to par.

Yeah, the ''thing for 3dfx'' i have too and that's what started this all for me. Having great memories about my first voodoo1 i wanted to built a pc with a voodoo again. Then it would be nice to built one with a v2 sli setup.....after that i was in trouble and still not cured to this day 🤣

I draw the line with 486. It is the slowest that can hold a 3dfx, funny to see how it can even speed up such a slow computer. I did have a 386dx 33mhz but for me there is no use so i sold it.

Hah. Modern "Brand craziness" is now a survival strategy.

For old systems I get what looks good. I have a DataExpert Socket 3 board with a Creative soundcard (Go creative amir) AMD 486, Athena PSU (Modern), S3 Trio32 on a Diamond Stealth SE, WD Caviars, and DTC I/O controller.

I am all over the place here and I would easily take Intel, Gravis, Segate, ATI, Cirrus, Whatever, but the reason I don't is always cost. If something is gonna perform just as good, or about so, that's fine if I can get it cheaper.

Today my favourite brands are Team Blue/Green with EVGA for cards, and if I could, EVGA for motherboard and PSU (Corsair for cooling and case), but brands like MSI, Asus, ASRock, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE, Cooler Master, Thermaltake, are all acceptable. AMD is a strange topic, I take Team Blue/Green if I can, but AMD is the poor man's powerhouse, which is what most of my systems have used.

For Modern brands its

Case Antec/NZXT
CPU Intel
Motherboard MSI/ASUS
PSU EVGA/PC Power and Cooling/Seasonic
GPU EVGA
RAM G.Skill/Muskin
Hard Drive Western Digital
SSD Samsung

Though I don't always get my preference depending on funds 🤣

I am using different brands. It is more or less what I could get, when I bought my hardware.

I always try to stick with as few brands as possible within my computer for "compability", my most drastic change was around 2003-2004 I guess when Farcry was released. A mate and me both build a new computer for that sole purpose, both of us used AMD/ATI up till then and were very satisfied with it however I sticked to AMD/ATI and he changed 180 to Intel/Nvidia. We both build a identical system in terms of power with the only difference being that the graphics were on an entire different continent, this is what made me decide to change to Intel from then.
Basicly I try to stick to Asus, corsair and Kingstone these days whenever possible.

Stepping back for the large brands, for me it's Intel and Nvidia for an easy retro life. There are exceptions like Super Socket 7, Athlon 64 and AM3+. As to individual parts I don't care much to be honest. Usually the price determines what I buy 😀

Documentation and support is a big one for me. So if a company has gone bust and there is no website with downloads, I tend to get something else. Like Gigabyte has downloads for their Socket 7 stuff still, I value that a lot because it means I can save time, which is saving money.

There are multiple good options for the majority of items, not very constrained with most choices.

In '97-2000 3dfx is the only choice, and for the next couple of years nVidia has wider compatibility than the competition from ATI. No good reason to settle for anything else.
Creative is the place to turn to for EAX and it was the only game in town in the XP era; they're also the DOS ISA choice over any clone for me personally and Gravis is an extra, but in my 9x configuration their stuff (Live/Audigy) is only my third choice after sufficiently covering DOS and A3D.
Roland is it for MIDI from MT-32 to General MIDI, Yamaha is my only alternative when it comes to GM.
Plextor is the go-to brand for optical drives in the 2000's.
Microsoft for mice and game controllers, with some big exceptions.
As a rule, ASUS motherboards are nice from 486 up and they've featured in 80%+ of all the builds I've ever put together. I don't feel they're ever the sole option, though.

I love many AMD products up to the end of Socket A, A64 is fine but uninteresting. Intel is great across the board with the exception of their long crappy Pentium 4 era.

I don't really have one single brand that I prefer, I tend to look at things from case to case.

With the older stuff I simply picked anything that looked kinda interesting (dumpsterdiving and knowing hardly anything about computers back then, so I had to either take what I found or leave it for someone else) and later I simply grabbed stuff I could get relatively cheap and tended to buy in bulk or buy several items from a single seller.

So I ended up with both good stuff and bad stuff, but I soon learned about the very bad stuff and started avoiding it. And jfyi, to me "bad" doesn't equate to "slow" or "old" or even "cheap" I wouldn't have gotten those VIA C3s and Cyrix MII's even when basically only collectors wanted that stuff.

For old PSUs I soon started preferring FSP as these looked very plain but were very common and easy to find and were actually not defective or absolutely craptastic most of the time. I ended up with many extra spare parts of diverse make as I tended to prefer buying second hand whole computers which I knew had FSP PSUs inside (better chances of nothing fried as all old computers were sold as untested).

I've always avoided anything AT or ATX that was not standard (think Dell and the likes) or not a tower and I avoided larger stuff that was obviously much poorer quality (gutless wonders, ATX cases with thinner sides than a can of beans, memory modules of crappy make and known problem hardware).

And about ASUS: My very first motherboard happened to be a P2B and it should still be operational today. But ASUS has definitely made many poor choices and I wouldn't blindly rely on them anymore. And btw, I've come across way too many boards that were superior to similarly aged ASUS boards (especially Intel boards, certain OEM boards and Gigabyte boards). A7V133, all these ASUS proprietary parts (USB thingies?), P5A boards that won't even work with K6+, an ASUS AM3 board that used some crappy chipset heatsink that detaches from the chipset every time I touch it due to the way they designed that nice-looking chipset heatsink (reapply TIM again 😒 ) and lets not forget about busted caps and other finicky stuff that ASUS tends to pull off...hmm...maybe this finickyness is actually something to be liked and loved for any tinkerer! 😁

And I always tended to prefer to get hardware that was interesting but had very bad rep (think SiS chipsetted motherboards or Cyrix or Virge or GF MX or 3DFX even) since even then I knew "bad rep" is something for the foolish anyway, so I stocked up soon and cheap.

I used to like Samsung harddrives a lot till they got bought by Seagate and was a fan of OCZ for a while (none of their PSUs or memory modules have failed as of yet) and these days I tend to keep going back to DDR3 by Crucial and avoid Seagate.

I prefer flexibility over brand, but only for as long as it works 😁

Tetrium wrote:

I don't really have one single brand that I prefer, I tend to look at things from case to case. […]
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I don't really have one single brand that I prefer, I tend to look at things from case to case.

With the older stuff I simply picked anything that looked kinda interesting (dumpsterdiving and knowing hardly anything about computers back then, so I had to either take what I found or leave it for someone else) and later I simply grabbed stuff I could get relatively cheap and tended to buy in bulk or buy several items from a single seller.

So I ended up with both good stuff and bad stuff, but I soon learned about the very bad stuff and started avoiding it. And jfyi, to me "bad" doesn't equate to "slow" or "old" or even "cheap" I wouldn't have gotten those VIA C3s and Cyrix MII's even when basically only collectors wanted that stuff.

For old PSUs I soon started preferring FSP as these looked very plain but were very common and easy to find and were actually not defective or absolutely craptastic most of the time. I ended up with many extra spare parts of diverse make as I tended to prefer buying second hand whole computers which I knew had FSP PSUs inside (better chances of nothing fried as all old computers were sold as untested).

I've always avoided anything AT or ATX that was not standard (think Dell and the likes) or not a tower and I avoided larger stuff that was obviously much poorer quality (gutless wonders, ATX cases with thinner sides than a can of beans, memory modules of crappy make and known problem hardware).

And about ASUS: My very first motherboard happened to be a P2B and it should still be operational today. But ASUS has definitely made many poor choices and I wouldn't blindly rely on them anymore. And btw, I've come across way too many boards that were superior to similarly aged ASUS boards (especially Intel boards, certain OEM boards and Gigabyte boards). A7V133, all these ASUS proprietary parts (USB thingies?), P5A boards that won't even work with K6+, an ASUS AM3 board that used some crappy chipset heatsink that detaches from the chipset every time I touch it due to the way they designed that nice-looking chipset heatsink (reapply TIM again 😒 ) and lets not forget about busted caps and other finicky stuff that ASUS tends to pull off...hmm...maybe this finickyness is actually something to be liked and loved for any tinkerer! 😁

And I always tended to prefer to get hardware that was interesting but had very bad rep (think SiS chipsetted motherboards or Cyrix or Virge or GF MX or 3DFX even) since even then I knew "bad rep" is something for the foolish anyway, so I stocked up soon and cheap.

I used to like Samsung harddrives a lot till they got bought by Seagate and was a fan of OCZ for a while (none of their PSUs or memory modules have failed as of yet) and these days I tend to keep going back to DDR3 by Crucial and avoid Seagate.

I prefer flexibility over brand, but only for as long as it works 😁

I also loved Samsung drives... to bad they don't make them anymore. I still have my 4GB samsung that came with my K6-2 PC from 1999/2000.

For modern machines it really depends on needs / budget. If it's high end, intel (if RyZEN is good, then AMD). For mid end I choose intel as well, usually second hand to get as good a part as I can in the budget. For entry level AMD. video card-wise I chose the nvidia GTX 1070 because it has the performance level I wanted, and no competition from AMD. For mid-end I'd go with a 4GB RX 480/470. In fact I have a Powercolor Red Devil V2 RX 470 on the way for my living room PC. I chose it over the GTX 1060 because it performs better in DX12/Vulcan and it was about 20e cheaper.

So I usually go for best buy - back in 2009 I had a GTX 460 because it was way cheaper then the 5850 and performed about the same. Later in 2010 I got a GTX 480 second hand, and then a HD 7950 because it was slightly faster and a lot cheaper then the GTX 760, and the performance gap only increased as AMD released driver updates.

I don't like nvidia as a company today. They have a shitty habit of crippling older GPUs with driver uptades and gameworks bullshit. I tested this recently with a Galaxy HOF GTX 780 (non-Ti) and a MSI Lightning? R9 280X. With release drivers, the 780 is 20-35% faster in most games, but in recent titles, using the latest drivers from both AMD and nvidia, they are almost on par (the nvidia is still slightly faster). In fact my 7950 scores (Sapphire Dual-X OC) close to a reference GTX 770 in the same conditions, but with release drivers barely manages to edge out the 2GB GTX 760... You can test this yourselves if you have the cards.

In general I love nvidia video cards - ATi cards as well. I have a huge collection of nvidia cards, raging from the Riva 128 (NV3) all the way to the GTX 280. The only nvidia cards I'm missing are a Geforce 256 DDR (I have the SDR version), a Geforce 3 (non-ti), a Geforce 4 Ti 4400 and an FX 5950 ultra. The NV1 is too rare and expensive so I won't bother trying to find one. I avoid modernish entry level / mid range cards like the 8400, 9400, 9600, GT240 and all that nonsene. Those will be all over the place in a few years, with people practically trowing them away. My ATi collection is smaller. I'm still missing a Radeon 7200 and 7500 and a working X850. I'd also like a 9100 (although I have a couple of 8500 cards witch use the same chip) - but then again ATi cards didn't sell as well and are harder to find.

For the most part, I really have no preference at this point because the scarcity of <486 era hardware makes it less of a "chooser" situation and more of a "take what you can get" situation.

I have a weird one for you though - take a look at my avatar - I have/had these in my collection or considered adding them as they come up (at least in the case of the last one).......

All three of those are from a computer shop in Norcross Georgia known as GEM Computer Products, whom were owned by MECC, seemed to have had a special deal with Samsung (there's a GEM AT "clickety" keyboard on E-bay right now - it's a Samsung keyboard), and had a series of short lived southeastern computer shops known as C.MORE. For some reason GEM kept putting out computers in the 286 and 386 era that were in really cool oldschool full AT and XT cases. the XT above is a 286, and the middle one is the only AT clone I've ever seen that mimics the look of a original Compaq Deskpro 8086/286/386. The case badge looks cool as heck too with it's Eurostile Raster Font. Shame I can't find them very often. Wish I could find one like the one in the middle again, a few even, that's my favorite case of all time. I think GEM provided for military, and my first was the middle one and it came from a Military Lawyer so yeah.

For other hardware...not much preference, though I really like FIC, Octek, and Biostar for Motherboards on vintage stuff. I will use anything I can get but prefer intel on most of my legacy builds because I've had better stability with Intel stuff. For hard disks, it really depends on the era or model, not a fan of really early Seagate myself, but their 486 era stuff through now has been solid. I LOVE Western Digital Caviar and Quantum Fireball/ProDrive stuff as well. Probably the most brand Nazi I have ever been is Creative Labs SoundBlaster stuff, but that's because I've had so many clones I could not find the drivers for long before VOGONS existed that I'd just rather stick with a stock SoundBlaster and get the old drivers from their website.

All I ask is that my hardware has a brand, and is not some weird generic Taiwanese/Chinese crap. There are a few brands that I avoid though, such as VIA/FIC, PCChips and Packard Bell, etc. , if they have a reputation for crappiness.

When it comes to retro stuff- not at all. I take almost anything I can get my hands on, provided I have space for it. Yes, even PCChips, they made some 486 PCI boards and those aren't really easy to come by. Not really a brand but I do have a preference for PCI over AGP video cards, specifically anything before the Geforce2/Radeon era, as I don't have a SS7/Slot 1 PII build suitable for those early AGP cards. (Other than 3Dfx, of course. I always get those.)

Modern-wise I actually have preferences. Notably, I avoid Asus like the plague as I had an AWFUL experience with one of their boards (M5A97 2.0) on my first custom-built PC, and my brother who purchased an Asus laptop some years ago which died on him barely a year afterwards, and got screwed by their customer support. I'm sure plenty of people have Asus products that give them no issues, but my opinion of that company is definitely soured after that.

• CPU: Intel (unless AMD steps up their game with Ryzen)
  GPU: Nvidia, manufactured by MSI or EVGA. Shady corporate tactics aside, ShadowPlay is just too good to give up.
  Motherboard: Gigabyte or MSI.
  PSU: Corsair, EVGA or Seasonic.
  RAM: Kingston and Corsair are the only I have experience with. Any reputable brand, really.
  HDD: Hitachi/HGST.
  SSD: I don't actually have one, but I've heard nothing but good things about Samsung.
  Mouse: Logitech! If they know how to make anything, it's mice.
  Keyboard: Preferably mechanical. Anything not made by Razer.
  Case: NZXT S340 looks the nicest in my opinion.

I started with the retro's a couple of years ago and i also took what i could get. Fortunately i was early enough to get what i wanted and be picky about it. I had to make choices also, otherwise the pile became way to big. I will always have much more than i can use, no need to become an even bigger hoarder.

It was never easy to find stuff (i don't use ebay) but after putting in a lot of time searching and beeing ready to make a deal when one came along i found the right parts.

For stuff like 486 it was different, no choice in brands but just happy to find a good vlb and a good pci board (Asus stays on the wishlist).

A lot of bad comments about Asus, while i have those bad experiences with Gigabyte and MSI. Personal preference, and that's how it should be. They can not all make only perfect products, and they can't all be bad either.