as one of the manufacture reps myself....
I can see how ECS can do or not, ECS undoubtely makes some reliable motherboards, but unfortunately the company never really builted its branding.
When you sell as much as ECS does, a bad reputation is certainly ready to develope when you have a failure rate of .01% or more. More speficallly a typica PCB board manufacture have failure rate of .05 to 1.5% , including the none defective part sent back to manufacture by users who are unable to trouble shoot problems correctely, to determin a good and defective parts due to resource or knowledge.
unfortunately for ECS, computer user do not talk about, or blog about how great their board is unless they are overcloking with certain boards, they'll generally talk about cpu speed, hard drive size, memory speed, vga card..... etc etc..
but EveryOne complaints whenever they hit a problem.
Here is where it went wrong for ECS:
7 years ago #1 motherboard seller covering low - mid level with help of tier 2( now none-existing ) chipset manufacture.
if they moved in their own brand say 4 million motherboard in U.S. , with return rate of 2% (for those who hate their quality, looking at max here) = 80,000 people.
I am sure out of 80,000 people lets say 70,000 were taking care of well enough to not make any big deal that can influence too much of others buying decision, but they will pass the word around oh I got this and it just didn't work.
Than we are left with 10,000 who might had a worse experience, and 1,000 of that probaly try to tell the whole world!
bad news never go away so as you see, ECS learned and improved their quality over the years i am sure, how else can your survive, unless you have buyer who can trust in your product.
7 years later, ECS quality have gone up significantely, which is why every time a person say i had a bad experience with ECS, serveral other shows up with: ECS is the great cheap and stable, they help out fast or something.
they are still not catch up on all the special gadgit and nifty feature, they are working on them. but really do you need all that overclocking these days? its not guranteed, it can cause unstability, it can take out life expectancy and cost more ! you can easily buy a system at a much lower price if you are not looking to hack it too much.
why ECS can have 20% growth, when people realize like i do, don't pay for what you don't need save it for the next system, in this economy maybe it will benifit them as people start to see sometimes, saving for the next tech that comes out is really the way to go with technology updating every 3 months!
you might spend $200 - $300 more on a great overclockable system. in 6 month, I can probally use the same amount of money and buy something even better at stock speed that kicks your systems *** and not making my system work extra hard at all.
LOL.
I am still on my first Core 2 Duo and I can't find a reason to upgrade...
Well, maybe starcraft 2 ... but thats never coming out...