Agreed. I was looking at that one as a replacement! Or a Gigabyte of approximate equivalence seeing as it's ASUS that just messed up on me.
Anything at about that level should be fine. Expensive enough not to have cut-corners but cheap enough not to be loaded down with nonsense.
I've got a Gigabyte GA-Z97P-D3 in my server that came as part of a bundle from Scan. Looks like it's a more basic version of all the Z97 based boards.
Oh, I forgot to update the thread. Yeah, it was the motherboard. Swapping that utterly jiggered Windows but it so happened to be the Windows 10 release day so I had an excuse to do a clean install (of 8 so I could upgrade to 10) anyway.
The shouting and screaming was particularly effective.
Thought as much, it's always worked for me
Sounds like Fozza (well, maybe not quite..)
Are you sure you didn't over-volt the AGP slot?