I love the Asrock H81 Pro BTC boards. For their price I find them amazing and I never had any issues with any of them.
These seem to die easily, how long have you been using them for? I am trying the biostar atleast they have a 3 year warranty for RMA.
I have 4 of them and I've been using them for over a year and I picked them up for the current equivalent of 0.26 BTC each. On arrival I just updated the BIOS and I'm using them with powered USB risers without plugging the additional molex power cables into the board. And they are one of the coolest boards I had (chipset heatsinks tops out at around 50°C)
There might be different revisions though or bad batches or you were unlucky or used bad quality power supplies - or they are indeed bad and I was lucky but my experience is so far positive.
Same here (powered risers, no molex). I like the fact that they accept Haswell CPUs which have a very low power consumption, like the Celeron G1840 which is very cheap.
My rig has 3 GTX 750 Ti and consumes 33W at idle, 191 at full load.
Bonus point for BIOS updates directly from the UEFI.
