This video kind of misses the mark on delivering the points of the title, but these are the simplest boiled down points of the community gripes:
- ASUS is having quality control issues, or deliberately skimping to pad profits
- They are rebranding lesser quality components with the higher quality ROG brand, and pricing it as such
- They are unilaterally voiding warranties when users try to RMA or return said hardware
Gigabyte (remember them?) did this same slow slide of enshittification about 10 years ago. The issue pretty much boils down to a company producing too many different types of things, instead of staying good at the things they do well, and the community has noticed and is calling for boycotts. This will no doubt put them on the defensive for years to come, and affect their overall standing in the larger community until they correct course.
Gigabyte (remember them?)
Sure do! Both my board and the board in my wife’s computer are Gigabyte. So’s my video card. The only issue I’ve ever had with their stuff has been a bad stick of ram a few years ago, which they exchanged without argument.
Brands in this sphere I definitely have had trouble with: MSI, Razer – so many problems with Razer – and ASUS.
Yeah so the thing with PC parts suppliers is that every brand is going to have people who have experienced problems with their stuff.
Gigabyte I’ve never had a problem with, but yeah during the pandemic their power supplies were fucking exploding so yeah that’s a problem.
Asus I’ve never had a problem with, but yeah their boards on both sides have been setting voltages and power limits very aggressively, killing AM5 CPUs catastrophically, potentially causing instability on higher end Intel chips as well it seems. That’s a problem.
Etc etc etc
I’ve had problems with Logitech. They still make good peripherals, but it’s more luck of the draw for me recently, so QC may be getting cut.
QC??? Hadn’t you heard that the end user is the new totally free Beta Tester? But don’t worry, they’ll solve the resulting support issues with AI.
I keep hearing this and wonder if I should buy bulk mice before they come preinstalled with malware or something because they last decades so voting with your wallet doesn’t really work.
What are the problems with Razer? I’ve only used their mice, so I honestly don’t even know what else they make
Keyboards, headphones, laptops, a handheld Steam Deck imitator, and various other RGB gamer shit. All of it is trash. Their business model nowadays seems to revolve entirely around upselling Aliexpress quality Chinese garbage at premium prices and then methodically denying every single warranty claim for defective and DOA product using spurious excuses. Oh, and their driver software is crap. And their products are consistently behind even Logitech on the features you get for the price.
Through no particular intentional means, I am now a Logitech convert. For mice and keyboards, their stuff has always been consistently reliable for me, their “G” series driver software is significantly less irritating than Razer Synapse, and most of their stuff is cheaper as well.
I think in my lifetime I’ve trashed four Razer keyboards, at least as many mice, and two pairs of headphones. All of these died early deaths – within weeks, sometimes a couple of months at the outside. Every time I tell myself this time will be different. It never is. I don’t buy their shit anymore, and I don’t recommend anyone else do, either.
I mean their mice are terrible too. I went through three of their mice in two years back in like 2016. Been using a Logitech g2 whatever their most famous one is since then and it’s not had a single problem. So much so that I bought two more for my other computer and my wife.
My msi motherboard randomly erases boot entries, I have to keep the computer on for a few minutes and reboot so that my other boot entry appears.
It maybe a problem with the m.2 slot, but it has been the case ever since I bought the motherboard.
Anyways I’m gonna stick to a different manufacturer for my motherboard if I’m building a new PC.
I have a 14 year old gigabyte motherboard in my older computer. When I first got it I didn’t know what I was doing and plugged the wrong thing in somewhere and blew up a component on it. As long as I don’t use that slot it chugs along just fine. I wish companies would just keep making things that last I’d gladly pay a fairly steep premium for that. Instead it seems every company that gets known for making good stuff decides to shit all over themselves
I’ve had good luck recently with Gigabyte. I know it’s circumstantial but my hope is that they are recovering.
Anecdotal like the rest of the posts here, but I recently built a new rig for gaming/lab testing and used a Gigabyte board for the first time in a decade after seeing good reviews and a solid sale price.
About 3 weeks after setting everything up it just crapped out. Would reboot seconds after you pressed power. Checked and verified absolutely every other part, no luck. Tried to contact support, got the runaround for a few days until I was directed to a site to submit an RMA request.
That was a month ago, zero movement still. About 4 days into it I bought an identical part of Amazon and “traded” em. I’m usually pretty ethical about that kind of thing but this was ridiculous and I needed the PC working ASAP.
Who’s decent anymore? I always used to go with MSI.
Looks like big companies buying everything has unexpected downsides too (aside the known downsides).
- They are rebranding lesser quality components with the higher quality ROG brand, and pricing it as such
Meaning you could sue them as fraudulent?
No. The ROG brand is ASUS’s brand in the first place.
Like, anyone could be like “this is my normal quiche, and this one here is my MuMu quiche.”
Then, once everybody’s buying MuMu, start using the normal recipe for MuMu. It’s not illegal, but at first people think they just got an Ok MuMu, then they start realizing it just sucks now. Hard for the company to recover from that.
But voiding and not honoring warranties?
Yeah.
That’s when you introduce the PuPu quiche that uses the original MuMu recipe and start the process all over.
Videos are a terrible way to communicate small amounts of information and these comments aren’t super insightful so I guess I’ll just move on.
My ROG Strix main board somehow didn’t support(?, idk what word would be accurate) Microsoft .NET Try using Windows with that. (That is intact why I used Linux for the first time) After a year or so I got tired of .NET not working and switched out my main board(to MSI). Everything worked perfectly fine since then. I don’t even know how that’s even possible
I refuse to believe there is a ROG board that “doesn’t support .NET”, even if that phrase weren’t already borderline nonsensical.
Bruh it just didn’t work, I still have this shit ass main board. Linux worked almost completely fine on it(besides some windows applications) but Windows itself would run until I switched the main board. I just used this phrase because I’ve skipped over it in a forum while figuring this issue.
Asus has become shit get over it
I’m old enough to remember when ASUS was viewed as one of the best hardware manufacturers you could go with.
It has been a long, slow decline for ASUS. They really manufactured their own demise here.
Puts out defective products then misleads consumers to think they have voided their warranty so they can’t get a replacement for said defective products.
There’s more too it but that’s the main thing that made people turn on them.
You’ve just described my entire experience with the Transformer tablet. After a year of sending it in within days of receiving it “repaired,” the day after my warranty ended, they said they discovered a faulty network chip and could replace it for the price of a new tablet plus shipping both ways.
I’ve been shouting “Fuck ASUS” for the past 10 years and I’m so glad I can now join others in it.
The usual. Hardware quality slowly goes to shit, company starts getting tricksy with consumers to make money instead of making quality product.
The big one was the BIOS update that nearly fried a lot of 670 motherboards that ASUS turned around and tried to avoid taking responsibility for, trying to pin issues on the consumer.
It’s capitalists being capitalists. Completely ruining their brand to squeeze out a short term 1% increase in revenue.
We are in the “how many of my customers can I screw over and completey piss off and still make a profit” stage of capitalism.
Sending out defective boards, then refusing RMAs for said defective boards. They basically go “You voided the warranty by opening it, lul git fukd loser.”
Never mind the fact that (unless the board is visibly broken somehow) you’d need to open it and plug shit in to test it. So there would be no way to test it without voiding the warranty. It’s a catch-22 in action.
The truly shitty part is that using the board doesn’t void the warranty. But ASUS is claiming the people trying to RMA all have voided warranties. If it were only one or two, then yeah it may be scammers trying to avoid losing money after roasting a board. But it quickly turned into a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario, where nobody is believing ASUS anymore because they’re basically just blanket denying every single warranty RMA.
The problem with asus was all the engineers who cared went to asrock when they split. For those who don’t know, asrock started life as a subsidiary for asus to cover the low end and OEM markets. There used to be a lot of shared engineering between the two companies but there started to be some bad blood between each other as asus was releasing server hardware and asrock was releasing enthusiasts hardware. Ultimately it was decided since neither side wanted to stop stepping on the others toes they would let asrock fully separate from asus as a company and let the market decide things. Ironically that only lasted for three years before the majority stake in asrock was bought up by Pegatron, a company owned partially owned by asus…
When was that? I don’t think I’ve ever viewed them as anything except junk and I had an asus laptop in 2007 or 8.
I hate ASUS. Used to be way in on them – well not way but relatively. I had the ASUS ROG Phone. The screen unfortunately broke and needed to be sent into service. More unfortunate, it was just about 1 month out of warranty.
So I get it set up to send it. ASUS charges me $300 for the phone screen replacement. It took over 8 months for them to get it back to me. When the phone finally did arrive, the RGB lighting didn’t work, the NFC didn’t work, and the screen itself had an orange hue in the upper right corner. To boot, it would only connect to AES Wi-Fi networks, so I can’t even use it without a SIM card because who the fuck uses AES. They didn’t even fucking fix it properly. I never got responses, sending e-mails for months after it was finally returned to me.
Now, in this time I was really patient. I was using a temporary phone. Around month 5, I just needed a new phone and was looking into the newly released ROG Phone 2. I figured the ROG 1 would still get plenty of usage as a spare device. Well I had the ROG 2 until AT&T decided that the phone didn’t have the supported bands anymore, so my >1 year old phone is now as effective as an iPod 3g. Just 6 months later, screen itself just died, no fall, no nothing. I can use SCRCPY to use it, the screen just doesn’t work. I really, really tried to give them a shot and the benefit of the doubt.
Now, in between these ~2 years I’d accumulated a few accessories for the phones, keycaps and backpacks. Just little things – ngl, the bag and the keycaps are still really good quality. I also decided to upgrade my PC, and was looking at a nice new motherboard to rebuild my existing PC with.
So I get the ASUS B550 or something like that. Stupidly bought it from Newegg, first time. The motherboard arrives and upon building the computer I just cannot get it to POST. I reach out to the 2 likely culprits, the PSU and the MoBo. EVGA sends me an entirely new PSU, free of charge, and tells me not to bother shipping it back. ASUS on the other hand would not accept that the motherboard could have been the point of failure! And when I FINALLY was able to fully prove that every single component in the board works EXCEPT the MoBo, they told me to take it up with where I purchased it from, Newegg. So I would get to pay some ~20% restocking fee on a broken motherboard, instead of the manufacturr just replacing a defective board. Oh, the best part? The motherboards USB-3.0 header was broken, came right off when trying to plug it in. No wonder it wouldn’t POST.
Fuck you, ASUS. Fuck your shitty warranty, your awful customer support, your horrible treatment of customers who put their trust into you. I will never support ASUS again and I will always vehemently suggest anyone else. It’s really, really simple to be a good OEM, all it takes is replacing things that break. ASUS treats every single customer like a scammer who is trying to get free stuff out of them, which IMO just goes to show that’s exactly the mindset ASUS has as well.
I still have the motherboard btw. If anyone knows how to repair a USB-3.0 header I’ll either be glad to be guided through a repair or I’ll just send it to you for cost of shipping. It’s just going to sit in my garage otherwise.
Going to corroborate this with that I had a really similar experience with my old Sabertooth 990FX board. Was supposed to support Bulldozer, and they put out a BIOS update the night before Bulldozer launched. I grabbed the update, put it on a flash drive, and updated the board. It would never post after that. RAM, CPU (FX6100), graphics card were all reseated multiple times. Never even gave post beeps, so there wasn’t even a hint as to what was going on. Even tried a different PSU just to be safe.
ASUS told me to get shafted because they couldn’t guarantee I updated the BIOS safely.
CompUSA exchanged it with a pre-updated board, no questions asked.
I fucking miss. That. Store.
I’m still so bummed about EVGA leaving the graphics card market! My 2070 super still runs fine, thankfully, but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth.
Reattaching the connector is relatively easy. But unless the pcb itself is really mangled, a missing connector won’t affect the computer POSTing. Can you send a closeup of where the connector should be?
It’s in my garage at the moment, but from memory (it’s been a year or two now) the USB-3.0 header straight up fell off. The PCB should be fine, which is why I have a feeling that I could likely just resolder it, so long as the pads themselves on the PCB were ok.
I’ll see if I can find some time this week to dig it out and share a photo, thank you for the offer!
This is a terrible video. 20 minutes just to say “bad customer support”. But then, who does nowadays?
On a sidenote, the pearl, the jewel I got from their CS is “WeLL I gUeSs tHiS LaPtOP oNlY sUpPoRtS ThReE ScReEnS iN tOtAl”. Bitch! This laptop has 3 separate video outputs! And 2 screens built-in! The fuck is 3 total? Besides, it totally worked until some botched update on their side…
I miss the activeness of the r/saveAClick community.
The closest lemme alternative is https://lemmy.nrd.li/c/savedyouaclick
We need that here for these click bait posts
You can have more video outputs than your machine can actually use simultaneously, that’s a fairly normal characteristic. It allows you to have a greater variety of output port types without needing more framebuffers inside the GPU. If an update bricked it then it’s not that specific characteristic obviously. Probably it’s the fault of the GPU manufacturer issuing a bad update that they then repackaged.
Maybe you’re right, but I haven’t seen a GPU that doesn’t have at least 4 distinct outputs in a while, not that I’d expect one in a machine of this class either. The problem, if I were to guess, is that this machine has AMD iGPU with Nvidia dGPU and a switchable MUX on top of that so it could boot with(or without) either as primary. That’s like three points of failure already. On top of that, I had the main panel cracked and badly malfunctioning, so I’ve removed it, just in case, for about a month while I waited for replacement. I guess some firmware update did not expect the main panel to be missing(or to have different s/n) during update and did something stupid to the mux setting that made it so that two outputs can’t be active simultaneously. I’ve tried to reach someone half-competent at ASUS for like a couple months, then just said “fuck it” and installed linux. Now living happily with 6 displays up and running, theoretically up to 9 if I do some output splitting shenanigans. Someday I’ll actually build that setup just to dunk on that rep who told me it could only handle 3.
It’s fairly common for iGPUs to have less outputs. Apple M1 was especially bad as it only had 2, and the internal screen on the laptops couldn’t even be disabled if I remember correctly. I think many Intel (or maybe AMD) iGPUs only have three outputs.
Yeah it definitely sounds like a driver issue. I have had issues with dual GPU systems like that on Linux, not had any on Windows yet. It would be interesting to see to be honest. I’ve had laptops before where the video ports would only connect to the dGPU, and the internal screen used Optimus (display output from the iGPU with graphics acceleration from the dGPU on demand). Lots of dual GPU laptops are MUXless like that in fact.
