Asus issues apology, promises changes after RMA and repair cost outrage

yRaz said:

It's getting to hard to remember who to boycott anymore, I can't keep up with this nonsense world we're living in.

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The main reason I hate upgrading motherboards, their all awful.

dangh said:

I think you just need to choose your poison, those are corporation and their goal is to make money, not to make people happy (as long as that not going in a way of making more money).
I am set up with gigabyte, sapphire and amd, not sure if best, but it works for me for a number of years.

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Well I do a few PC builds for other people and for them, warranty service is a concern when I put together a build for someone else. I usually just buy what's cheapest at the time and deal with the consequences which is usually a DOA part that gets solved with an RMA.

After 7800x3d incident and personal nightmare I wouldn't touch Asus even with a ten-foot pole

yRaz said:

Well I do a few PC builds for other people and for them, warranty service is a concern when I put together a build for someone else. I usually just buy what's cheapest at the time and deal with the consequences which is usually a DOA part that gets solved with an RMA.

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I had a MSI motherboard that ruined RAM put in the memory slot nearest to the CPU. Instead of sending me a new motherboard to replace the new motherboard that was bad, they sent me a refurbished board that also ruined RAM. MSI's RMA process just ruined $200 kits of RAM each time I put 16GB of RAM on them. Never again, MSI.

I was once a proud owner of the P3B-F mainboard. Years after I switched to various brands and only recently started owning Asus products, namely a school-grade Vivobook and a Zenfone 8. The NVMe SSD in the Vivobook started to act up 2 months after the warranty ended. Zenfone 8 turned out to have internals cheaped out. The wifi max speed can only get up to 130 Mbps while even a $200 Redmi phone managed to get beyond 150 Mbps. The worst is the GPS, it can only connect to half the number of satellites a midrange Xiaomi is able to. Getting the GPS signal to lock in a car is a constant pain. Not to mention it had only 2 OS updates and now has gone 6 months without sec updates.

My conclusion: NEVER BUY ASUS PRODUCTS AGAIN.

I have been using Asus only motherboards since 2007 (Core 2 days). Since that time I have owned three or four high quality top of the line Asus motherboards including my present one, Asus Maximus VI Hero bought in 2013.

Fortunately for me I never had any problems with them.

However, the comments section at Amazon.com, Newegg and other online stores selling Asus PC components are filled with bad reviews left by scr*wed customers.

In their review, they describe ASUS' customer support: Asus apparently outsourced it's customer support dept to India/Bangladesh/Paki/Nepal/Sri-Lanka. The ppl who answer the phone are not knowledgeable when it comes to PC components, often lack basic knowledge of ASUS products and their standard of English is (ofc) low.

The other kind of bad reviews were made by badly skinned customers:

-Ppl who send in PC components with minor dmg only to be told that their component is broken and exorbitant amounts of money requested for repairs and postage. (exactly like Tech Jesus)

-Ppl who were denied warranty.

-Ppl whose warranty claim was accepted by ASUS but were sent instead faulty products to replace their own faulty product. There's stories out there, especially at Amazon.com, of ppl receiving three faulty products in a row from ASUS as a replacement.

ASUS has gotten itself quite some notoriety for customers being scammed when they get their PC component repaired and for laughably ineffective "Customer Support" handled by the Hindustan sub-contractors.

I always paid a premium price for Asus products - but why if warranties are such a problem now. I think its time to switch to a different brand... there has just been too much nonsense.

I used to favor Asus parts in my builds, but the scandal from a year ago made me completely avoid Asus in my last build.

I agree that motherboard is a hard category to pick because they are very complicated and tend to have problems. It is hard to discover if it is going to work for the exact way you are going to use it ahead of time. Having good customer support is critical. Get the word out there on what company currently is good or bad, pay attention to others, then vote with your wallet. Reward the company behavior you hope to see more of.

Oh, and thanks to Steve at Gamers Nexus and his team for holding companies accountable!

You guys should really read the comments below Tech Jesus' video.

It's much worse than I thought. ASUS is getting piles of it thrown on them by the truckload.

I've used ASUS mobos for over a decade at this point, for my builds and others'. I fought with a completely non-functional armoury crate for years, with the given solutions being to reinstall my OS.

I got an MSI board for my test bench when my 5950x had a CCX die (under water no less), and ended up liking it so much I swapped it into my main rig.
Zero issues so far, and their software actually works. So MSI has become my go-to at this point.

whateversa said:

I always paid a premium price for Asus products - but why if warranties are such a problem now. I think its time to switch to a different brand... there has just been too much nonsense.

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I believe this is what they've been known for and spend a lot of years building towards but it seems like their reputation is just a thing of the past: both their quality and their service is about as bad as your average PC component manufacturer.

So, if you basically have to roll the dice with every purchase anyway, I'd just pick an Asrock item instead that's always consistently cheaper than equivalent Asus counterparts. Gigabyte is basically on the same boat and MSI has had it's long list of dirty laundry as well.

Not to say that I do not expect issues with Asrock products as well, its just that if I know I'll get a lousy post-sale service anyway from the 'Big' names like Asus or Gigabyte, I might as well save money upfront and see if my parts are functional on the RNG game that is modern PC building.

I've sworn off asus for a decade and I don't see that changing.

I've felt that too many companies were skimping/denying warranty support on their products for about a decade, thus I'm not willing to spend a lot of money on hardware.

Take the Cryto Scam issue with GPU's. I've never paid more then $200 for a Mid-Range GPU - GTX 1060/Radeon 5600 as both of those have been good enough for my needs and I still have them. I did take advantage of a Deal for a Radeon 6800 (non-xt) as it was pretty decent but I didn't pay for it, it was a gift from my sister. Yes I do have good relations with my Sister unlike most brothers.

I'm even looking at going with a server board from SuperMicro with a budget Epyc 72xx series (8c/16t) chip. Don't need anything better but I do need the I/O capabilities that the 128 PCIe lanes offers. Too many times I'm seeing my drives suffering I/O contention simply because there's insufficient PCIe lanes available even with me using an 8x PCIe lane based Drive control card (LSI 9200-8i).

Once again ASUS promises to get better. I'm looking to see if they fail again in 6-12 months because now outlets are looking to prove if they improve or not.

My next build will likely be leaning to a different provider.

They have proved to not be very trust worthy for multiple years running now. This matters to me as I only get to build every 3-5 years.

jellowiggler said:

Once again ASUS promises to get better. I'm looking to see if they fail again in 6-12 months because now outlets are looking to prove if they improve or not.

My next build will likely be leaning to a different provider.

They have proved to not be very trust worthy for multiple years running now. This matters to me as I only get to build every 3-5 years.

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At this stage what's gonna happen is, in order not to get shafted, you'll just buy from Amazon (at least I will).

Amazon will take back the damaged PC component, pay for shipping and they will refund you the FULL amount paid.

I had this experience very recently with AMAZON.DE.

I bought from Amazon Warehouse a second-hand MSI RTX 3070 which artifacted heavily in windows environment and also returned Code 43 in Windows.

Amazon accepted the return, paid for return shipment and refunded me the full amount no questions asked.

You never lose with Amazon.

So I think big retailers like Amazon who employ such return policies will increase their business and smaller retailers who do not have Amazon-like return policies will lose business in the long run.

Edit - look at what ASUS repair ppl have been known to do. There are no words to describe their behavior. It's like dealing with Al Capone:

"..including a review process for abnormal pricing."
$3,758 for a cosmetic repair!
Oh, they're evil.

I'm not usually a fan of class action lawyers, but this is exactly the situation the laws enabling them were created for. ASUS knows the cost/benefit for any individual customer is to just give in to the $200 fraudulent extra charge, and that no one customer will have enough data to recognize it is criminal fraud vs. a mistake. So off to the bank they go.

I don't know if this is big enough for any of the serious firms, but what they bring to the table is subpoena power. Until the legal process kicks in, ASUS can "apologize" for "misunderstandings." But when the actual records are obtained, and employees are testifying under oath, they'll be able to investigate the difference between occasional mistakes and intentional policies. Starting with, what percentage of warranty repairs were performed as required, vs. how many were denied or up-charged for irrelevant red herrings.

It'll still do almost nothing for consumers already harmed, but it may at least hurt ASUS enough so the appetite for them and their competitors to continue the scam may be diminished.

Dimitriid said:

I believe this is what they've been known for and spend a lot of years building towards but it seems like their reputation is just a thing of the past: both their quality and their service is about as bad as your average PC component manufacturer.

So, if you basically have to roll the dice with every purchase anyway, I'd just pick an Asrock item instead that's always consistently cheaper than equivalent Asus counterparts. Gigabyte is basically on the same boat and MSI has had it's long list of dirty laundry as well.

Not to say that I do not expect issues with Asrock products as well, its just that if I know I'll get a lousy post-sale service anyway from the 'Big' names like Asus or Gigabyte, I might as well save money upfront and see if my parts are functional on the RNG game that is modern PC building.

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I often go with asrock for my personal stuff because I'm not going to use their support services. I've also not had one of their parts ever need warranty service.

OEMs contract with so many of the same producers to make and label a product for them that you're often buying from the same person with a different name.

Frankly, I think most of the market up for "premium" products should be in a no-hassel customer service. Asrock and Asus could be having boards made in the same factory. Even if that's not the case, I'm sure every OEM shares atleast one supplier with other people in the market.

Dimitriid said:

I believe this is what they've been known for and spend a lot of years building towards but it seems like their reputation is just a thing of the past: both their quality and their service is about as bad as your average PC component manufacturer.

So, if you basically have to roll the dice with every purchase anyway, I'd just pick an Asrock item instead that's always consistently cheaper than equivalent Asus counterparts. Gigabyte is basically on the same boat and MSI has had it's long list of dirty laundry as well.

Not to say that I do not expect issues with Asrock products as well, its just that if I know I'll get a lousy post-sale service anyway from the 'Big' names like Asus or Gigabyte, I might as well save money upfront and see if my parts are functional on the RNG game that is modern PC building.

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I too jumped ship to ASRock in my most recent build for a relative. I've been using ASUS boards for nearly two decades, but after this scandal and their recent motherboard QA issues, I don't think I'll be going back.

Achaios said:

At this stage what's gonna happen is, in order not to get shafted, you'll just buy from Amazon (at least I will).

Amazon will take back the damaged PC component, pay for shipping and they will refund you the FULL amount paid.

I had this experience very recently with AMAZON.DE.

I bought from Amazon Warehouse a second-hand MSI RTX 3070 which artifacted heavily in windows environment and also returned Code 43 in Windows.

Amazon accepted the return, paid for return shipment and refunded me the full amount no questions asked.

You never lose with Amazon.

So I think big retailers like Amazon who employ such return policies will increase their business and smaller retailers who do not have Amazon-like return policies will lose business in the long run.

Edit - look at what ASUS repair ppl have been known to do. There are no words to describe their behavior. It's like dealing with Al Capone:

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True, but that's only in a 30 day window from the time of purchase, not during the full manufacturers warranty period of the product. Also Amazon has made many recent changes to its return policies: https://financebuzz.com/amazon-return-policy-updates

ASUS make great hardware, but everything else about them is awful. They never answer customer support enquiries and their software and drivers are abysmal. My favourite rant is ArmoryCrate. This might be the worst and most pointless, buggy, resource hungry piece of sh1t I've ever had to use. Deinstall it (and make sure you disable it in the BIOS too) It's a new low when bloatware like this starts getting installed by your BIOS. Reviewers of motherboards need to spend less time on the features and more on the software and drivers.

OortCloud said:

ASUS make great hardware, but everything else about them is awful. They never answer customer support enquiries and their software and drivers are abysmal. My favourite rant is ArmoryCrate. This might be the worst and most pointless, buggy, resource hungry piece of sh1t I've ever had to use. Deinstall it (and make sure you disable it in the BIOS too) It's a new low when bloatware like this starts getting installed by your BIOS. Reviewers of motherboards need to spend less time on the features and more on the software and drivers.

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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in my earlier post here that Asus' proprietary software was another reason I stopped using them.

Generally, most of us know that hardware's proprietary software tends to be bad, but Asus was on a new level of bad. I found out that some strange, seemingly unrelated problems in games I was having were fixed when I removed Asus software. This was even after I updated that software. I got a surprising performance boost, too, once it was gone. To be fair, Asus did seem to have semi-decent and continued BIOS updates, though.

I am using MSI at the moment. I have had some issues. The jury is still out. But I was a little surprised that there was less software that tried to install itself.