PC builders do love a good brand feud, and MSI vs. Gigabyte is practically the Lakers vs. Celtics of the motherboard world — maybe not as loud as the NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU battle, but just as personal. If you've spent any time on Reddit, PCPartPicker, or your favorite tech YouTuber's discord, you know exactly why. You'll rarely get a straight answer when you ask the internet who makes better motherboards. You'll get opinions — and lots of them. Even after a debate has been settled and a winner has been declared, someone brings up boot speed or some other minutiae just to stir the pot.

Nobody in these threads reports any noticeable performance losses. One builder in r/buildapc, who happened to own both an MSI B650 Tomahawk and a Gigabyte B650 Aorus B650 Elite AX (both AM5 motherboards) summed it up pretty nicely: "Performance-wise they're gonna be pretty much identical. I've had both motherboards and I like MSI's BIOS a little better."

That's the recurring theme here: Performance is almost always a non-starter, but MSI motherboards do carry a small but noticeable lead thanks to a cleaner BIOS and straightforward software. However, the older crowd on Tom's Hardware seems more divided. We dug through users' posts and forums to see what people are actually saying between these two motherboard makers.