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.
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.
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 bought the $120 Razer Wolverine V2 Xbox controller after MS shrunk the official controller for the Series S/X and it was a piece of shit. Replaced it with a $45 gamesir (Chinese brand) with hall effect triggers and sticks that I've had for two years now with no issues and no drift, a first for any xbox controller I've ever had. Razer sucks.
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.
As someone with small hands, Razer is the only mouse I can use. All the beloved Logitech models are just too big. I've been using Razer mice for more than a decade. Only had a problem with one. I'd like some competition and alternatives, but the gaming market (side buttons) is for large hands. Which sucks, because people with large hands can also prefer that claw-grip and want smaller mice as well.
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.
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.
Maybe. Or just switch to whatever the good mouse brand is at the time. I'm rocking a Microsoft Intellimouse Pro (wired) on my desktop, which I really like. On my work laptop, I have a Logitech MX Master 3 at work (had lots of issues with the thumb button in the past), and a Logitech Triathlon (no issues).
My wife had a couple of the g305s die on her within a year, so I switched her to a Razer Deathaddr Mini, which has been good for over a year now.
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
Honestly, in your case, it could just be more about who makes what components can withstand X amount of punishment and keep the electrons flowing through so other things keep working 😂
Agreed on your point though. Cheap shit needs to stop.
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.
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.
For desktop motherboards I've usually gone MSI but my gaming laptop is an Asus and is a little over a year old. It's worked perfect since I got it and I've had zero problems with it. The Nvidia GPU and laptop fans sure do sing when I'm playing games though
I actually do have an MSI laptop. I forgot I had read so many negative reviews of the Asus that I went the other direction. After posting that I got on my laptop and realized my mistake and remembered the negative reviews about them
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.
Lol, yeah. The ROG line of phone has an RGB backlight with the ROG logo.
Honestly, I liked it. Could be configured to per-app notifications, and could be synced to other phones that had it. Not that I ever got to use this feature, it was returned to me BROKEN! lol
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!
My Asus motherboard started bluescreening Windows. After a lot of effort I traced it down to a specific device ID that windows was loading firmware for. No matter what I tried I couldn't get this auto installation to stop. It was a totally random component that added nothing I could tell.
Asus refused to release new firmware be cause the motherboard was "unsupported" even though the box etc has stickers saying it supports windows 10.
After a ton more effort I figured out how to make some low end api calls that eventually stopped this auto installation. It was mostly reliable. I got to crack a lot of jokes to my friends about my motherboard not supporting windows but it was a really hard period for me particularly because Linux gaming wasn't as strong as it is today. I was really big into league of legends at the time and this experience forced me to quit, losing touch with many friends in the process.
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...
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.
I still have the video I've sent to them at some point, it describes it in all detail, if you can bear my accent..
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.
Yeah, I've had some of those. Actually owned one of the first generation optimus laptops and it was horrible, most of the time it did not pick up the heavy load and stayed on iGPU even when playing games. Seems to be much improved a lot in win10-11, but I still prefer the kill-switch.
This one kind of works like that too, though. The MUX only controls which GPU the main panel is connected to (and with it, the framebuffer). The modes basically are:
"Eco" where only iGPU is enabled
"Hybrid" where iGPU is main and maintains framebuffer while offloading work to dGPU when needed just as you've described
"Ultimate" with Nvidia as main, which apparently gives much better framerate and latency because it does not require overhead of workload offloading and framebuffer shuffling, but the dGPU is by far the most power hungry device at 150W TDP which drains the battery in mere minutes, even on idle
I have had issues with dual GPU systems like that on Linux
I feel you. My previous setup was a desktop with both AMD and Nvidia cards, which I juggled between the host and VM. It was pain, mostly because Nvidia did not want to play nicely. Also because most utilities assumed I had Intel APU — I didn't, but it was fair assumption at a time. Nowadays, it seems like everything's sorted out, even VFIO was a breeze to set up (though what for, most games now play on linux nowadays thanks to steamdeck)
I didn't open the video. Was it one of those videos that talk in circles about what they're "going" to talk about in the video, then they keep saying it in different ways?
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
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.
I believe that you had issues. I can also easily believe that ASUS makes a board or windows drivers/software prone to problems. The specific cause you claim to have identified is simply absurd.
I've had two ASUS gaming laptops, and both of them began having issues within a year, and the second didnt last more than a couple years total.
The first laptop was one of their enormous ROG 17 inch gaming laptops that looked like it had jet engine exhaust. The hard drive died and the power port broke within the first year, and I had to send it in under warranty. The power brick also died, and I ended up having to replace it myself around the 3 year mark.
Thinking it was a fluke, I ended up buying a smaller, more portable ASUS gaming laptop next which had more of a standard form factor. Maybe six or eight months later, that one suffered some issue that required being sent in for service as well. It began experiencing the same issue about four months later, I'd sent it in for repair a second time for the same issue, and they apparently fixed it.
I got to use that laptop for maybe 1.5 years total before it was completely unusable, in spite of two RMAs.
My current gaming laptop is an HP Omen 17 from 2017, and has been completely stable and reliable up to this day. I love to hate on HP because of their dumb printers, but I'm pretty impressed. I'll probably end up buying another one, because I will literally never own another ASUS product ever in my life, and there are only so many manufacturers out there who I'd consider for a laptop purchase.
Enterprise laptops for CAD, etc. still prioritize battery life over performance. Switchable graphics are a pain to setup and troubleshoot for gaming, the screens are not optimized for gaming (almost always 60Hz), thermals can be questionable, and they're loud. Gaming laptops are built for that purpose, and they do it better than trying to shoehorn in a laptop built for an entirely different purpose.
Thank you for your input - I think a lot of that depends on the specific model and price point as well. Imo at the end of the day it's good to go for a laptop thick enough to accommodate a heatsink and look up any firmware restrictions on performance beforehand. Plenty of workstation laptops hit point one but I haven't gamed on them enough to speak for point two
I ordered a board from Asus last year. FedEx delivered it to the wrong place. Delivery picture was at some apartment somewhere. They gave me so much shit. I had to go to my bank to help me get my money back. Took over a month.
