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Asus = What???

Sorry, I have to disagree.
With the ASUS boards I have worked with (into the hundreds) I have seen nothing but issues from more then half of them, all the way back to the P5A-B. I will not buy ASUS for my own machines because of all the crap I have had to deal with with them... then again, they are not alone on my "crap" list.
 
Meh, I've seen worse. Asus has decent designs most of the time, and every manufacturer has issues with quality control. I got cured of my blind brand loyalty with a Tyan slot A Athlon board. Which turned out to be just a reference VIA chipset board in no way different from the bargain basement models. Ever since then I've done significant reading not only on the manufacturer and their current attitude toward customer service but also the specific board model I was interested in.

Google for 'PC Chips' if you want a manufacturer with a track record of going for a disaster result right out of the gate. With everyone else results vary by product.
 
P5A-B... Man I remember those boards... Hell I still have a copy of the last BIOS 1010b for that board... ASUS use to be a step above the rest but now they seem to be just run of the mill...

If my P5E Manual is any indication then I can understand why so many people are having problems. There is no comparsion to the care and detail provided in my old P5A-b Manual from 10 years ago to the little blips of info for each entry in the current manual... Some of the entries in the current manual I had to Google just so that I knew what i was adjusting..

But thats just me...

Hibrass
 
Originally posted by: Hibrass
P5A-B... Man I remember those boards... Hell I still have a copy of the last BIOS 1010b for that board... ASUS use to be a step above the rest but now they seem to be just run of the mill...
Click to expand...
Let me give you a little indication of why the P5A-B was one of the first boards to get me to hate asus...
I bought it new.
First day, the PS/2 mouse port failed, OK use a serial adapter.
First week, the PS/2 kb port failed too... ugh ok use a USB KB (back then expensive!!)
Then the fan monitor chip failed a couple days later...
then the fan headers stopped supplying power.
It went downhill from there, ending in a steep slope when trying to RMA the board... that is what got me to hate ASUS more then anything else... any time I had to RMA a board (I used to be head tech of a ma and pa comp shop) it was almost as much BS to go through as RMAing fujitsu and samsung hard drives.
I have had finickyness of all kinds from all sorts of asus mobos, to the point the shop stopped selling them and standing policy (decided by the store owner) was to recommend any asus-mobo bearing computer with hardware problems for immediate mobo replacement, including the ones we sold (and covered under warranty). We started using gigabyte almost exclusively... Talk about a nice change. ~edit~ And we blacklisted SIS and pcchips chipsets along with amd irongate and certain via chipsets, too.
 
Sounds like a truly nasty experiance....

I only did two machine based on that board.. One I don't know the status of, the other is still being used by my mother=n=law as an email machine...

But I will admit that a defective part doesn't bother me to much but if I had to go thru a RMA hell like you did, that would diffently put me off, bad product support is worse than a bad product...

Later,

Hibrass
 
Instead of reading the horror stories about ASUS, I would rather see a list of better alternatives.

You will ALWAYS have someone with really bad experience with ANY manufacturer.

Wanna hear about the Gigabyte...?

Just read a couple of recently updated threads right here at AT.

MSI...? ABIT...?

Sooooo....

Who's gonna be the next "bashing" victim....? 😉
 
ECS!

No, but really. Mainboards are complex beasts with thousands of individual components. And most they cost less than a dinner for two at a decent restaurant, a tank of gas or A/V cable at Best Buy. I think most people have rather unrealistic expectations from the vendors re: end user support -- any support at all is an amazing thing in itself.

I don't bother RMAing mainboards unless they fail immediately and without an OC. But then, I also don't buy $300+ mainboards either, so my view may be slightly different than most enthusiasts. I've had three boards fail in 20 years. One Asus, one Epox, and one PC Chips. The Epox failed because was made during the heyday of defective capacitors we all heard so much about, and they offered to fix the board for me even outside of 12 month warranty. PC Chips, no explanation needed (other than why I was huffing glue and chose to buy it in the first place). The Asus just up and died quietly one day after a year of faithful, trouble free overclocked service.
 
I've had pretty good luck with their boards & I've been using them for years. I've probably completed 8 builds in the past 5 years & only swapped out 2. The 2 replacements are still working fine (friends' systems). The 2 I'm running now are smooth as butter.
 
Brands can be powerful things. Love them or hate them, Apple, Whole Foods, BMW, Harvard, etc -- these are names to conjure with. They signify something, come packed with associations, even to people who are not particularly knowledgeable about their respective sectors -- indeed perhaps they especially affect such people, since they've scant actual knowledge or experience.

Whereas a brand like DFI means (or did mean?) something to the cognoscenti, ASUS is about as well known as a Taiwanese OEM gets. How many other OEMs could try to sell computers in the West under their own brand? How many other motherboard manufacturers could charge a 15 to 25 per cent premium for boards with the same features as 'lesser' brands? Despite the mixed reviews, a part of me couldn't shake the belief that, say, the ASUS P5K-E had to be a better P35 board than the Abit IP35-E -- after all the one board costs $140 on Newegg v $70 AR for the other!

But this is an OEM, not a true brand with a massive marketing budget, long history in popular culture, etc (how many movies clearly mention or display ASUS?). Where does their reputation come from if not from somebody's direct experience? Did it begin with the P2B? Does Apple's Reality Distortion Field overflow into the rest of the ASUS OEM facilities? I paid up for an ASUS A7N8X de luxe rather than an Abit NF7, and I couldn't get my Barton to overclock stable at 2.2 GHz. Did I learn my lesson this time?

If I weren't in such dire financial straits, I'm not altogether certain I'd have plumped for the Abit over ASUS for a P35 board...
 
All right, in the rarefied realm of $200+, eight-phase boards that my purse forbids me even to glance at, does ASUS offer compelling qualite products? Perhaps someone with more direct experience of high-end ASUS boards could enlighten me.
 
I've used mostly Asus boards over the years and am currently running a Maximus Formula & for what I payed it seemed like a good deal, I had a P5K Deluxe before it and didn't want to go through the hasle of RMAing it for 1 bad sata port (6 drives & only 5 working ports) so I ended up replacing it w/ the X38 board and overall I've been happy w/ the ROG x38 board, bios support has been fairly flaky but on the upside you can just flash it to a rampage if you want to play. I gues its a board that just gives you a fairly decent overclocking experince and seems like a quality product w/ alot of nice features like the LCD poster good onboard cooling and plenty of voltage monitors and tweaking ability.
 
I like Asus for it's motherboards and that is it.

I have used:
A7VX-X Deluxe
A8V Deluxe
K8N Deluxe
P5K-E
 
Though this isn't a motherboard, I did pay a premium for an ASUS product after all: $196 (including postage) for their 9600 GT card. I made the purchase through a lesser known retailer (xpcgear.com) because they were able to guarantee I'd receive the older version of the EN9600GT. My reasons were literally superficial. ASUS uses variants of this artwork on several of their cards, mostly at the high end of the market. Surprisingly tasteful for geekwear graphics.
 
Yep, placing a sticker on the heatsink was pretty much the only thing Asus had to do to that 9600GT. The rest was shipped to them fully assembled.
 
Originally posted by: jaqie
Sorry, I have to disagree.
With the ASUS boards I have worked with (into the hundreds) I have seen nothing but issues from more then half of them, all the way back to the P5A-B. I will not buy ASUS for my own machines because of all the crap I have had to deal with with them... then again, they are not alone on my "crap" list.
Click to expand...

I used to tell people "dell is a piece of crap"... then I saw the competition...
If you think ASUS is crap then you need more experience with its competitors...

I am very experienced with the following motherboard makers (listed from best to worst):
ASUS - my first choice, expensive, and tends to be limited in features, but it all works well. They also provide decent support. (if you compare to other companies, not to what you would expect from dealing with non computer stuff).

MSI - As stable as asus if not more, but engrish and bad at supporting their stuff.

Gigabyte - quality components, horrible support, software often doesn't work and will never work. Don't expect to get all that you pay for.

ABIT - fast, high performing, and utterly failing when it comes to reliability. they break, and break, and break some more. You need a miracle to get a non defective board and have it STAY that way.

ECS - ECS stands for Extra Crappy Systems. It is not that the components fail, but rather, their software and bios is just extremely incompatible, with EVERYTHING. expect to juggle the rest of the hardware and replace part after part until you get a configuration that actually works... also engirsh and no support.



the thing is, computer users are USED to horrible abuses... 9/10 new games CANNOT be played start to finish on version 1, you need to patch it to solve some show stopper bug. BIOS is alway crap early on, things are constantly released with bugs and incomplete, and usually are NEVER completed or solved... the state of the PC industry is so horrible that people just learn to accept it.
 
What is the Asus famous for?
Click to expand...
I've never figured it out, myself. ASUS has always made full-featured boards with attractive retail bundles but charged a hefty premium for it. ASUS has for years consistently recorded the highest Average Selling Price (ASP) of any Taiwanese motherboard company, and not by a small margin, either. But refinement, BIOS support, and reliability is no better than anyone else with premium products, AFAICS. ASUS has offered some innovative features but at least as many miss the mark or amount to little more than marketing glitter.

I have been following ASUS for a couple years now, particularly on its support forums, and I came to the conclusion months ago that ASUS was getting mired down in the excessive girth of its own unwieldy product line.

SKU bloat can and does get away from companies. Too damned many models aimed at every conceivable segment and price-point. This can hamstring a company's ability to effectively respond to emerging technical issues or bug reports, because it has not expanded its technical support resources at the same pace as its rapidly expanding product line.

And this certainly seems to be the case, with ASUS lagging behind everyone else in addressing various issues like adding Phenom support and reworking the BIOS to support production Q9450/Q9300 on all applicable models.

ASUS only has like 50 different models that support 45nm, I can't imagine what the hold-up is. :roll:

Gigabyte has a major revision control problem (e.g. Rev. 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 3.3...), but at least it has discovered the concept of "common BIOS" so that it doesn't have to rework a unique BIOS for every revision.
 
Well I've built a number of systems for myself over the years and here's what I've noticed base on that experience.

The best mb's I've used have come from asus, dfi, abit and msi. The worst one was from aopen followed closely by shuttle. All manufacturers have their periods of less than stellar products and that applies to just about every type of manufacturing on the planet.

Right now I've got mb's from asus, abit, evga and dfi powering my 4 home pc's. I haven't used evga long enough to form a long term opinion of them yet but their 780 sli a1 mb has been solid so far.
 
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