Yes I'm Bitter

Hardware
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I posted this to reddit but I wanted to share here too. Whenever I can I like to make a point of telling people to consider avoiding ASUS if they can.

TL;DR ASUS denied my warranty claim on my workstation motherboard, after I proved that if there was damage, it happened at the RMA center. They then sent the board back to me unrepaired without signature confirmation, it got stolen, and I was held responsible for the lack of signature confirmation leading to the insurance claim being denied.

Around a year ago, I bought an ASUS WRX80 Motherboard to pair with my Threadripper PRO 3955WX cpu for my Davinci resolve video editing/ vfx workstation. It was a huge investment, but I decided that it was time to move to a workstation platform responsibly, tailoring my PC toward reliability.

Before this, when I thought of ASUS I thought of premium materials, premium components, and responsive customer service. ASUS products are expensive, but I’m looking at this as the foundation for my business; buy once cry once.

Here’s what happened.

I was trying to learn about ipmi and the bmc, since it was my first time having access to that feature. In the process of learning about it and trying to use it, the bmc stopped being detected. After troubleshooting in literally every way I could, outside of outright replacing the CPU or Motherboard, I put in an RMA with ASUS.

I was in the middle of a project at the time but I thought the ipmi failure could be indicitave of a larger issue and after spending all of that money , I decided I’m not taking the chance. I followed thew RMA instructions form Asus, taking pictures of the board, packaging it securely and seding it in.

A few days later I got an email from the RMA center saying they can’t honor the RMA citing damage to the board. At this point, my heart dropped. I thought the box had been crushed in shipping. It turns out that what had actually happened is that they made the decision to hang me out to dry. They pointed to a scratch on the board that looked to me like it had happened at the RMA center and sent me an invoice for $500 for the repair of my basically new motherboard.

I escalated the RMA and sent an email to the executive office and was assigned a specific person to look further into the issue. They claimed that I damaged the board when I had photos, pre shipping , showing that this wasn’t the case. When I sent the person assigned to my case these photos, he agreed with my asssesment that, the board was packed well and that it wasn’t damaged before I sent it.

I only had the setup for a short time and I was already dealing with the worst case scenario. My system was down for weeks dealing with ASUS and they disn’t want to honor the warranty on a product built for professionals. I hadn’t recouped the cost of the system from paid work yet, so I couldn’t afford to just do the repair and accept the loss as the cost of doing business.

I had a call with the ASUS rep assigned to my claim. After agreeing with me that if my pre-shipment photos don’t show the same damage that they claimed, it would have had to come from the RMA department. He said the board was confirmed to be carefully packaged, so we both assumed it didn’t happen in shipping. I sent the photos sd we discussed and felt like the misunderstanding was finally going to be rectified.

Soon after, I got an email about my claim stating that after thoroughly investigating themselves, they found no wrongdoing. I brought up the photo and asked for a side by side with my photo and theirs and he just repeated over and over that the RMA department said it was like that when it got there.

He apologized a few times after telling me they could repair the board for a slightly discounted rate. At this point, I was trying to complete a large project piecemeal from an underpowered laptop, which I had started on the workstation; I had no money. I was infuriated.

In the end they denied the RMA, and charged me for return shipping. They sent the $1000 motherboard back via fedex, without signature confirmation. The box got stolen and I got nothing. ASUS blamed me for not specifically requesting a signature when I wasn’t told it was an option I had to opt in to. FEDex denied the claim because there was no signature confirmation. I had nothing and I lost the client to sparked me building the workstation that marked me investing in myself and taking my career pursuit seriously.

I still begrudgingly recommend the PRO Art monitors because there really isn’t an equally high quality alternative in the class, if you want to buy new imo.

I want to make it clear that I may have had bad luck and the following experience may not be indicative of a widespread phenomena. Also, I’m not under any illusion that convincing you to “vote with your wallet” will affect ASUS in any way. I’m nobod, I just hope that if you can use something other than ASUS, you will. Ultimately my warranty coverage was identical to the one you get buying used on craigslist and to me, that defeats the purpose of the higher cost of ASUS products.

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Well the thing is…all companies have their issues.
Things can go wrong during an rma process somewhere in the chain.
But you might find better luck with another brand maybe.

Asus did have some reputation issues with AMD X3D cpu´s a while back.
But i think that storm has calmed down a bit.
if you have to boycott every brand once somebody has an issue with it.
Than i think you should not touch any tech really.
Every brand has their issues from time to time,
the bigger the brand the more likely you will read about it.

I personally don´t care about brand loyalty.
I just look at which board offers me the best features for my needs.
And i look into the vrm, build and component quality for the best price.

In your situation i would just go with a different brand next time.

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Yeah you are allowed to be bitter, If i read this i miss physical shops so hard.

are there any solutions, its not that somebody would have a spare wr80 board doing nothing to send you

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In Germany, I just send it back to the retailer I bought it from. No problem within the first year of purchase. Consumer rights is a thing I love as it provides a peace of mind.

Seeing people across the world talking about these incidents makes me having these even more valuable.

Things just happen. And products have flaws and are broken. No one can prevent that. And sometimes communication is difficult and sometimes the company just gives a shit about their customers…always good to have the law by your side.

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Can confirm… Most recent BIOS update fixed my most recent gripe with ram kits. My 64GB kit works flawlessly now.

I am sorry you had this issue. I can say the people you talk to/deal with from a company can make a huge difference to you. SOmetimes you get a chain of *$&^ people, other times the best people.

I’d say time to try someone else too. Lot’s of quality manufacturers out there.

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Damit i think i had finaly made my mind up yesterday. And i wasn’t going for an asrock am5 motherboard but for the Asus pro art am5. Because 10gbe, but i guess i go Asrock and buy a 10gbe card when the internet provider is going to connect my house to 4gb fiber

I really don’t like this because i never not had an asus motherboard in my main computer. the asus p5a was my first one

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Asus has always been pretty scum imho. Their products are designed to appear premium, but be cheap where it matters, their customer support is terrible, their policies are awful, and they only move for major public backlash.

I haven’t had a great deal of experience with a lot of different brands, but I’ve never had a problem crop up on the few gigabyte products I’ve owned; they seem to either work forever, or be a dead duck from the start.

MSI, for their faults in marketing, policy, and frequent product design faults, tend to take customer feedback a lot better than Asus at least, and will actually forward complaints to the relevant department if you ask them hard enough. I’m still using one of their Z97 boards so many years later, too, and it’s a rock solid board that gives me no grief, except when mashing delete too early and getting into a corrupted bios splash somehow.

ASRock seems to be the budget jank-brand, where nothing they make quite works correctly, but you get a boatload of features for the price. I don’t know how their longevity is, though; my embedded motherboard is flaky AF on booting up or rebooting, but it’s been that way since day one, and doesn’t seem to have significantly changed, and the X470 board is too new and underutilized to really know how it’s doing.

Each major brand, imo, seems to offer something unique in terms of value. Asus’, though, seems to be mostly “gamurr prestige” these days, or some very premium expensive features like factory calibrated wide gamut displays, stuff like that.

I should probably update this to mention that Asus actually has some very cool features they seem determined not to ever tell anyone about.
I don’t know how much of it is Asus specific, platform specific, or just plain randomly down to individual board design though, but my Asus board can detect Windows installs with no bootloader associated with them, which is pretty cool, and it has idle/standby power to USB for charging, which is also cool. My MSI Z97 board has neither of these, but it may be AMD-related, X570-related, random-board-design-choice-related, or maybe Asus thought these were important and opted to include the work for properly implementing these features. Credit where due, but I honestly can’t find them ever find anyone talking about features like these anymore, and they’re pretty cool stuff.

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I have had a lot of companies fix things that were not warranty work but they decided to do it for free still.

I have had Asus deny things that should have been warranty.

I would not take a free Asus product.

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Well a couple of users on this forum actually own the Asus pro art X670E Creator board.
And as far as i read they seem to be pretty happy with it.
Did you have personal issues with Asus products?
In that case i understand that you would consider a different brand.
But then for am5 you either have to spend big bucks on Msi to get 10gbe onboard.
Or You have to spend additional money for an addin card.

Also yeah Asrock am5 boards are great
i personally really like what they are doing with their boards.
But yeah choosing a board is really a matter of personal needs.

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I have a old sabertooth 990fx rev 2 motherboard that has been through everything and it’s still going. Seems like good economy times makes for awesome parts…on the other hand bad times make for worse products and service.

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I have 20+ years of good experience with asus,

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Exactly what I was going to say. I’ve gone through an mobo RMA with ASUS that turned out was unnecessary. I couldn’t get 3600 speeds on the QVL RAM set ASUS recommended. They said it was the mobo and RMA’d it. I got a completely different board back with the same issue (and a broken USB header at no extra charge.) Left a bad taste in my mouth for that brand. That said, Intel didn’t have the raw power I needed so last year I bought another TR CPU and ASUS mobo. No hardware issues so far.

Your situation sounds horrible though.

When a competitor to ASUS comes along, I’ll take a look at them. If they can fill my needs better, I won’t hesitate to swap over. Companies need to earn your money.

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Basically my experience with asrock. Despite the slack gigabyte gets I’m 4/4 on them including used and open box items.

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This is why I mostly buy used enterprise crap on ebay. It’s just not worth paying for “new” and getting a “warranty” anymore. Or at least not for my personal stuff LOL

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I’m one of them. 10GbE works great, ECC works great, 4x32GB DIMMs work great. It’s just a great motherboard in general. I bought it for the 10GbE and ECC support, and haven’t had any reason to contact ASUS for support with it, so I can’t comment on that, but as a product I think it’s splendid. Certainly the best AM5 ATX motherboard on the market.

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Yeah it kinda depends on what somebody seeks in a motherboard really.
I mean for those who actually need 10Gbe onboard,
and take advantage of the TB ports then it is definitely the board to buy.

I wished that Asrock also had implement 10Gbe nic on the Taichi board,
just like they did with the X470 Taichi Ultimate.
That would have been awesome.

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Today’s 10Gbit NICs are multi-speed. You can use 1G, 2.5G or 10G. So you don’t need to use 10Gbit right away.

I’d advocate for “10GbE for everyone” and scrap 1G. Sheer volume will smash prices down to WiFi card level.

And once there, we can start talking about 25GBase-T and Cat8.

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Yes that makes totally sense of course.
If they would implement 10Gbe as the standard on new boards,
that would kinda make the others redundant.

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Is it not the case that 10GbE chips are still twenty times more expensive than 1/2.5GbE? They also need actual cooling rather than just sinking the heat into the PCB. There’s a reason motherboard vendors are so hesitant to give us decent networking on consumer boards, I just feel it’s very bad form to cheap out on networking when they don’t hesitate to throw away much more money on useless audiophile nonsense like isolating the analog audio traces between bare PCB layers. A customer who cares about the induced noise from the rest of the motherboard wouldn’t be using the onboard audio anyway, they’d use USB or a separate sound card that actually isolates the power supply. At least isolate the PCIe and memory traces that actually matter, analog audio is going to be garbage regardless.

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ASUS are definitely on my shit-list due to years of crappy products, but also shit I personally owned - basically every ASUS product I’ve owned.

ASUS MX299 monitor - literally fell apart in the Aussie heat as it was stuck together with double sided tape

Some random ASUS NIC - driver support abandoned after kernel 3.x

ASUS routers = lack of firmware updates, most hacked shit on the internet

I’ve generally had good luck with Gigabyte for motherboards over the years.

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