Asus Motherboard ?

[colormebad]

I have a few friends that are running this board' what you guys think about it...They say its been one of the best m/b's they have ran..And has onboard video' HDMI/DVI/VGA

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131773

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Avoid asus at all cost. I got acouple boards coming back now that are just plain dead. My dad's board has crap out. My two p5n-d boards overheat like a piece of shit and doesn't run stable when a quad core processor or dual channel is enabled requiring voltage bumps.

The build quality is crap, support is poor, the boards will eventually bite the dust and they'll screw you on a RMA three times and give you back the same board with nothing done to it.

avoid like the plague.

[ratdude747]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Avoid asus at all cost. I got acouple boards coming back now that are just plain dead. My dad's board has crap out. My two p5n-d boards overheat like a piece of shit and doesn't run stable when a quad core processor or dual channel is enabled requiring voltage bumps.

The build quality is crap, support is poor, the boards will eventually bite the dust and they'll screw you on a RMA three times and give you back the same board with nothing done to it.

avoid like the plague.

agreed. don't buy ASSus boards.

[c_hegge]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

^
Agreed here too. no @$U$

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Friends don't let friends buy Asus.
.

[colormebad]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Thats strange! Everyone i have talked to in the last 4 days have highly reccomended Asus....And they have the best rating out of all brands on every site i have been to..I talked to a Sony Tech early that said he wouldnt own nothing but an ASUS...But you get different answers everywhere you go...I will buy an ASUS just because they have nothing but good posted everywhere i check and techs i talk to...A friend of mine said they sent him a board & overnight it back last year when he had a problem' said they gave the best of service...Their ratings speak for itself...

[colormebad]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Here is the boards 2 of my friends have....Like i said' we must be talking about a different ASUS...

http://www.motherboards.org/review/a...-review?page=4

[Ami Sapphire]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Lol, same company.

[ratdude747]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

reviews don't mean crap.

reviews are only good if you plan to keep it for a month before upgrading to a new system. All they tell you is short term info. usually ASUS does well here.

what a review will not tell you is how it will last long term... as in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc. down the road. this is where ASUS fails.

so, if you want a good system for a few months but after that want a paperweight, then buy asus. If you want something that will actually hold up and serve you for a decent amount of time, don't buy asus.

[colormebad]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Thats like saying Obama & Romney.....

I will stick with Romney & Asus...You can take 999 and Obama' which is the other.....

[ratdude747]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Thats like saying Obama & Romney.....

I will stick with Romney & Asus...You can take 999 and Obama' which is the other.....

OK, you might want to pre-fill your RMA form, as you may need it... ohh wait, I forgot, ASUS RMA= slap a new serial no. sticker on the RMA'd item and return it as a replacement.

Don't say you were not warned...

[momaka]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

reviews don't mean crap.

reviews are only good if you plan to keep it for a month before upgrading to a new system. All they tell you is short term info. usually ASUS does well here.

Precisely.
Just have a look at all of the reviews for the cheap PSUs ($10 to $25 range) on newegg.com - most of them have a 4/5. Does that mean they are all good PSUs?? Absolutely NOT.
An average person doesn't really know what's in their power supply and they don't really care as long as it's cheap and works for the moment. And that's exactly why those cheap PSUs have good reviews, because *most* of them work for the moment.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Thats strange! Everyone i have talked to in the last 4 days have highly reccomended Asus....And they have the best rating out of all brands on every site i have been to..I talked to a Sony Tech early that said he wouldnt own nothing but an ASUS...But you get different answers everywhere you go...I will buy an ASUS just because they have nothing but good posted everywhere i check and techs i talk to...A friend of mine said they sent him a board & overnight it back last year when he had a problem' said they gave the best of service...Their ratings speak for itself...

Those people don't repair motherboards at component level as most people here do and as such they don't have the slightest idea about the build quality.
-
Asus hasn't been good quality since the 90's.
They use under size MOSFETs, inadequate EMI protection, often cheap caps, and their BIOS is bitchy about RAM.
-
There is also ASDS. "Asus Sudden Death Syndrome".
Asus boards will just die for no identifiable reason.
[I suspect it's chipset damage due to cheaping out on the EMI suppression.]
[It would not surprise me if using a cell phone too close can kill an Asus board if the case is a design with poor EMI shielding.]
-
You can read about Asus customer service right here in a couple of threads.
At least here you know it wasn't written by an Asus employee posing as a happy customer.
.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Reading a review on something fresh out of a box tells you squat. [Not much.]
-
The only reliable reviews are written after at least a year in service.
That's when 'we here' usually see Asus boards.
.

[mariushm]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

People on this forum are obviously biased against Asus - I don't know what to say.... I only used Asrock and Asus (about 6-7 boards so far and all run well) but I have to admit I don't keep them for more than 2-3 years.

The oldest two I still have access to are some value boards from Asus at my father and my sister, which are Socket A boards and still run well, 5-6 years now I guess.

In the end, technology evolves so fast most people don't really have the same hardware for more than 3 years, which is about as much as the warranty is, and you don't have to bitch to Asus or their customer support if you have problems, you just return it to the store.
Maybe this is an issue for you guys in US, there's no issue here in Europe where we have slightly better customer protection laws I guess. I mean, we actually have laws overriding whatever warranty manufacturers offer and impose a minimum of 2 years warranty, or something like that.

Back to the topic, the board is fine. Nothing particularly interesting about it or jumping out as a flaw.
Obviously not designed to be a super overclocker due to small heatsinks on the vrm area but it will overclock a bit and it looks like a nice mix of pci express and old PCI slots, in case you want to reuse some older hardware.

PS...

There's a lot of factors that have to be taken in consideration when discussing service and repairs and so on - just because you people get a lot of Asus boards in the service doesn't mean Asus sucks. Some questions would have to be asked...

1. What kind of boards are coming to the service? Are these mostly in the value segment or spread over the whole range?
2. Are they the typical boards that are sold in stores like Best Buy/Target etc therefore bought by people with little IT skills or they're from all over the place?
3. Are these boards oem boards from HP or other desktop computers, where there are other conditions that can damage the boards faster (inadequate cooling for example)
4. What's the market share of Asus in US compared to other board manufacturers ? If Asus has 70% of sales and other brands have less it's obvious you'd see more Asus in the service...
5. What's the other manufacturers' policies related to warranty, rma etc? Maybe other boards fail just as much but they have more user friendly policies so you don't get boards to your service because they're handled by their rma departments...
... and there's lots of other things I could think of

I've shared a room in campus with a guy working at warranty department of an IT store here in town (a few years ago, when the Socket A and P4 used to be popular) and Asus and Gigabyte had equal % of failures related to the number of units sold - they'd get something like 20 out of 250 Asus boards coming back, 10 out of 130 Gigabyte coming back. They got 5-10 out of 300 Asrock boards coming back to service. That's within the first 2-3 months of operation.
Without a reference point, you could say the Asus with 20 boards are the worst but those were simply the most popular boards.

The store had the worst luck with ECS boards - I said in a previous post they once took delivery from distributor for about 500 boards and about 300 came back faulty within the first two months - they just replaced them with Asrock boards the moment the customer came with the ECS board at the store, no questions asked. So these didn't even get a chance to get to you and allow you to form an opinion about ECS.

A bit unrelated... Gigabyte sucked back then... you know why most failures were about with them? Gigabyte lying in the BIOS about the cpu temperature, showing it 5-7 degrees lower to look good in reviews, so noob people were overclocking and damaging their CPUs and the socket in the process.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Back to the topic, the board is fine. Nothing particularly interesting about it or jumping out as a flaw.

You mean besides the multiple complaints about the sound and the two missing support mounts (mounting holes) that cause the board to flex when you install cards or RAM?
- But that's just fresh out of the box.
.
Skipping mounting holes is a whole new level of cheap.
.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

There's a lot of factors that have to be taken in consideration when discussing service and repairs and so on - just because you people get a lot of Asus boards in the service doesn't mean Asus sucks.

Asus is the only brand that -regularly- dies for no reason at all.
.
Other brands you can figure out what caused it which means you can usually fix it.
Not with Asus.
.
And I'm FAR from the only one in here with that experience.
.

[ratdude747]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

Asus is the only brand that -regularly- dies for no reason at all.
.
Other brands you can figure out what caused it which means you can usually fix it.
Not with Asus.
.
And I'm FAR from the only one in here with that experience.
.

I'll back you up. I have an ASUS A8nx32-sli that pulled the SADS routine... replacing a couple KZJs didn't help... it was finicky at best and I could only get 1 of the 2 pci-e 16x slots to work... It was a free board but even so, the quality of the board compared to what the old owner paid for it new is unacceptable in my book.

I've seen it happen to a lot of people actually... ASUS has become the antec of motherboards...

Friends don't let friends buy ASUS.

[mariushm]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

You mean besides the multiple complaints about the sound and the two missing support mounts (mounting holes) that cause the board to flex when you install cards or RAM?
- But that's just fresh out of the box.
.
Skipping mounting holes is a whole new level of cheap.
.

Asus is not the only one doing that, see this board for example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128502

You're right, the ATX standard says the holes are required... but the actual ATX boards as specified by standard are wider than these boards so in theory the board shouldn't bend that much.

Besides, most people install the memory modules and processor BEFORE the motherboard is inserted into the case - that's how the manual instructs you to do it and how it's generally done.

As for the sound... it's probably related to UEFI bios support - the growing pains of UEFI - or the users' stupidity when installing drivers... if you browse the reviews you'll see the same complains about integrated sound and various quirks with lots of integrated sound codecs and various manufacturers.
Maybe we should go back to 30-50$ PCI/PCI Express sound cards and remove integrated sound cards.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Asus Motherboard ?

So what you are saying is Asus Engineers come up with theories that go against established standards in order to make it cheaper -and- they don't actually test these theories to see if they work-out before releasing them on production boards?
.
I'd have to agree with that.
.
The missing holes and all the complaints about the board flexing are pretty solid proof.
.
.
The GA is using 7 holes and no complaints about flexing.
Ya think maybe GA was bright enough to make the PCB a little thicker?
.