VelcroSnake

As far as Nvidia, I generally went Asus or MSI.

For AMD I'd go Sapphire or PowerColor.

There are definitely brands I avoided though. Back when I had an Nvidia card, I shied away from EVGA mainly due to how many people seemed to know how amazing their customer service was and recommend them based mostly on that, gave me the impression their cards had reliability issues.

For AMD I'd personally stay away from anything not reference (Sapphire I think), Sapphire, Powercolor or possibly XFX.

How often people recommended EVGA due to their customer service scared me off of them. If so many people know how good their customer service is, it made me wonder how reliable the actual cards were.

I always viewed EVGA as being recommended so much less because they were actually the best, but just because of their customer service, which actually made me weary of them because it seemed so many people had experience using EVGA customer service...