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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.
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.
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…
Shit, if Asus is no good anymore, what brand is good nowadays?
MSI is still on the come up. Can’t think of a bad component they’ve released in many years.
ASRock is always rock solid.
Gigabyte seems to be making a comeback.
NZXT just started expanding on making components, and has really feature stuff. One to watch, though higher-end.
It’s funny, ASRock went from a company I’d never fucking heard of to one of the top names in the space. I used to be like “what’s this no-name brand?” and now I’m like “Oh ASRock, I know them.”
Unrelated, I miss the old Gigabyte Dual BIOS, where it had a backup BIOS in case the default got corrupted. Which mine did, a lot.
EDIT: NZXT? Wait, this NZXT? https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2021/NZXT-Recalls-H1-Computer-Cases-Due-to-Fire-Hazard I’d personally wait a while before jumping all in on them. Fire hazards in components is a pretty big fuckin deal.
I miss the old Gigabyte Dual BIOS, where it had a backup BIOS in case the default got corrupted.
This is on many higher end enthusiast/overclocking type motherboards, I’ve had it on multiple MSI and Gigabyte boards.
+1 for MSI. I’ve bought GPUs from them for 10+ years and never once had a failure or even a minor issue. Got a lot of mileage out of the GTX 1080 I bought in 2016.
it was spun-off from asus in '02, then acquired by a different spin-off in '10 which asus retains significant ownership of. so, yea, basically asrock is their “discount” brand,
I liked ASrock when they were in the ECS tier of quirky and weird. Got a Socket 939 board with the ULi M1695 chipset that was really nifty.
Then I had an awful experience with an AM3 board that claimed to run a FX-8350, until they edited their support list.
I grudgingly chose them for AM5 because it was $50 cheaper for the featured I wanted, and it’s been okay, aside from me breaking the x16 slot clip due to hamfistedly removing a shipping-container sized GPU.
Glad you brought up ECS. Not good for high-end computing, but really stable for low-end. I have a customer with an Athlon64 box I built them in a pinch almost 20 years ago now that just runs a POS system, and it’s never caused him a single problem. Sometimes budget minded brands work in a pinch. ECS is not super well known, but always been great with customer service and advance RMA replacements. I wouldn’t call their hardware super sturdy in some cases though.
I’ve been largely unaware of a lot of these things going on with Asus but the other day I was reading up on Armoury Crate, which Asus integrates as a hardware-level rootkit on many of their motherboards. That is absolutely goddamn absurd. Bloatware baked right into the hardware itself? I cannot express how scummy and disrespectful to your customers that is.
I’m very glad I picked no Asus parts for my latest build.
I had an msi board in my father’s build, and as I was eyeing hardware upgrades I decided to get some more life out of it by adding some memory and updating the bios, as it was quite old. After the bios update, it never booted again. The upgrade tool said it was the correct file, that it was installed successfully, and that I just needed to reboot. Their flashback system? Didn’t work. Researching, it was apparently a KNOWN PROBLEM that msi just shrugged off, and several boards from that era would die after an update. No apology, no resolution, not even an admission of guilt. Because of that fuck up, proprietary software that my father used for business finances, wouldn’t activate on a new machine - the company shutdown the activation servers, and it required hardware checks, and there was no work around. The new program? Unable to read the old file format. We lost access to 20 years of tax/receipt records.
MSI is blacklisted for me, my family, friends, and anyone who I perform IT services for. I don’t give 2 fucks if the hardware is 80% cheaper and 200% better. Fuck you, they fucked perfectly good hardware, my reputation, and if we ever get audited we’re fucked. Eat shit and die, MSI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
Looks like big companies buying everything has unexpected downsides too (aside the known downsides).
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.
