Almost same story here. Building several hundred rigs per year I now use almost exclusivly Gigabyte mobos with very few issues. Granted about 80% of which are the SS or better series. I was a longggg time ASUS fan boy before they burned me two different chip releases in a row on some of their $350+ boards. Two DoAs out of the box on first one, then finally settling on a possibly uninformed tech supports admitance of their being issues and sending a refund and the previous release board for free.(I bought a ton of crap from them at the time) The second DoA out of box, $300+ board, new chipset release. No biggie, it happens but they send me some clearly used up piece of shit that died not more than a week out of the 90 day warranty. I knew I should have sent it back right when I got it and saw it was used but did not want to hassle with it since it worked at the time. Only issue I've had with GA is ICH drivers on some boards but that is just as likely due to Intel being bitches about releasing them timely to the manufactureers as it is the board maker... ;p

  Maybe not a big range to warrant switching brands all together but when you pay that much for crap, you expect it to work. Moral of story, shit happens and unless a company consistently has a tendancy to turn out crap other things should be considered. Cost, component grade, consistency of company to handle end-user issues.

Edit; For all my rambling I neglected to ask which model were they, m8?