I love you guys. Good and honest opinions 
The real shame is that the profit margins on producing peripherals are generally so low that the bigger players have swallowed up all of the smaller players and left so little competition in the market that they have 0 reason to improve, and new production operations are prohibitively expensive to get off the ground for such low margins. The full list of consumer-grade PC hardware companies that I never had an exceptionally bad experience with:
- DFI, who hasnāt made consumer-grade hardware in like 15+ years now
- EVGA, who has been producing less and less hardware over the years and seems like itās days are numbered
- Seasonic, who only makes power supplies, which are among the most āsimpleā PC components
It has been my experience that if you buy enough gear over a long enough time, you will eventually have a horrible experience with all of them. It sucks, but as computer enthusiasts we are a captive market that only increasingly gets exploited.
depending on how salty you are you may or may not want to bother but, you could sue and probably win. for america and some other countrys you do have consumer rights but you have to sue to enforce them. theyāll probably try to settle for just the motherboard cost but if you fight them eventually you could get lawyer fees and court and other cost as damages. if enough people do this eventually it will eventually spur some changes in asus. probably the only thing that could because its not like the government is going to get off its ass and do its job to busy fighting civil war 2 electric boogaloo
also standard im not a lawyer talk to a real lawyer this is no legal advice yada yada
Oh for sure, every manufacturer will make a dud from time to time.
Howeverā¦ Iāve owned products from:
ASUS - 2 monitors, network adapter
Gigabyte - two current motherboards, iāve had about 6 of their boards long term, 2 GPUs
Abit (yeah iām old) - 1 motherboad (BH6)
ASROCK - a BeeBox and an X470 Taichi
Iāve only really had minor complaints on two of the gigabyte boards
- An old late 1990s era board which had chipset issues but that was VIAās fault
- Poor documentation on the cheapest nastiest gigabyte board i could buy for AM4 (B550M S2H)
Thatās it. Over the course of 25 years. Gigabyte may not be the fastest or best at anything but they actually work reliably in my experience. And thatās what i personally want out of my PC builds - shit to just work out of the box without me screwing around. I do enough of that at #dayjob
ASUS has fucked me every time. Extremely poor QC on their non-motherboard hardware, and general lack of software support. Their motherboards are by all accounts great, but i can not in good conscience give them another cent.
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My 2 cents; every company will need to deal with broken products at some point. It is not how well their products work but how well their company is at handling complaints, that separate the gold from the iron.
I would personally prefer to have OK-ish products with top notch customer service, than great products with terrible customer service.
Asus right now has OK-ish products with terrible customer service, but this might change in six months. Or it might not.
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Your detailed account can serve as valuable information for others considering ASUS products. Itās always helpful for users to share their experiences, whether positive or negative, to provide insights into the reliability and customer support of different brands.
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You can always buy stuff used (until they make that illegal, lol). Doesnāt really work if you want the latest and greatest gear but at least you are not giving money to some corpo you donāt like.
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Doesnāt work. You generate demand for that brand and raise second-hand prices, encouraging others to buy new stuff and sell old. You canāt escape economics. Only known method known to mankind is to not generate demand.
Buying used stuff is only a delayed reselling process for the same product.
It works in the sense that you personally are not giving them money. The object is to make you feel better, not solve the free market economy 
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Can you talk about your experience dealing with an RMA for a high end (~$700 or above) product with ASUS? Iām not disputing that when a high end item works well itās pretty nice.
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With any manfacturer qc is merely sampling of a product.
For instance the glass container industry.
A typical 8 section is machine may produce 8, 16, or 24 seperate containers.
Each mould numbered.
Depending on frequency of sampling, lehr length, speed, that percentage can vary.
Small Baby food bottles typically ran 36000 on a 90 minute lehr
Sampling for testing usually once an hour.
So subtract roughly 48 from 36000
Thats 35,952 that go on to machine and visual inspection.
So the odds of finding any specific defect?
750 to 1 against with qc inspection alone.
Granted if the defect is found in sampling then the product is held for further inspection or scrapped.
The biggest problem in qc of manfacturing is production management trying to force gray area or questionable product into pack.
This ends up as rejected by the customer because it was unsafe, and or caused problems on their machines.
Component manufacturing is the same.
Many components may or may not be tested by the assembly equipment.
So is it possible for bad parts to be installed and missed by qc.
Of course it is.
Issues with customer service?
Think about it!
Someone will be taking the heat for it and could lose their job.
So we have to prove we didnt cause the damage.
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If you want each component to have traceable QC, the price will get about a hundred times higher.
For example, a PC fan will cost 5 to 25$/ā¬. And then these magnificent objects cost upwards of 700ā¬/$ per unit.
Youāre underselling it a bit.
E.G
Now, some babies have lead poisoning and will face a lifetime of preventable suffering all because some stingy company didnāt do enough QC.
Exactly!
Its what we had to deal with all the time.
And im damn glad to be out of that place.
At first it wasnt bad. But with every merger the place went straight deeper in the sh!t hole
This depends on the product and manufacture. My company has several QC steps that are applied to EVERY board that goes through our SMT lines including verification, and x-ray solder inspection.
We do sample products for even more indepth verification but 100% of our equipment goes through QC.
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Iāve had bad experiences with RMA on both Gigabyte and Asus along with some off-brand Chinese brands whoās customer support wanted me to sign up for who knows what kind of privacy destroying SPAM h3ll, assuming I could even get ahold of them at all.
Iām at the point I just pay my local Microcenter for their extended warranty and theyāve always taken care of me, no questions asked. I donāt even have to worry about dealing with manufacturers anymore.
When a motherboard died, they took it back and my CPU that was perfectly good and gave my money back so I could purchase the equivalent model since my CPU was no longer compatible with current motherboards. I was only out the cost of RAM because the old motherboard used DDR3 and new stuff at the time needed DDR4. Worth it.
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last time i bought asus was in 2006 for a athlon64 x2 seemed great till i tried plugging an 8800gt in it.
erm NO!..
but but.
NO!..
BUT your supposed to work!..
erm! no!..
lol. i wasnāt laughing at the time. turns out there was a crappy via chipset used in a Ā£120 motherboard.
next day i upgraded to gigabyte and have used them in every personal rig since.
a while ago a guy called jj did the tech tube rounds.
straight up nerd and was on top of his game with the sales pitch.
needless to say asus took off againā¦ but same problems persistedā¦
over priced, over rated, over built on everything that didnt matter.
so yeah, feels for ya!..
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That the point right there.
Manufacturing mass products is a logistics nightmare.
Qc standards are rigid and inspection equipment must be challenged frequently with both calibration samples and defective ware samples.
Visual inspection ( person) is affected by attitude, state of rest and tiredness, and boredom.
Machine visual is affected by dirty and dusty lenses and diffusion plates.
And the biggest affect, tampering with set sensitivity.
Especially if management is being paid production based bonuses.
Cost of production is much lower if percentage of good ware is high, but that requires very quick response in repairing defect conditions.
And or preventative measures used.
So its between a rock and a hard place to be.
In order to be attractive to customers and attemp to ensure the safety or higher quality standard.
Production based bonuses are an abomination, but hey it makes the stockholders happy!
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I swore off ASUS 10 years ago because of their RMA department, and havenāt bought ASUS since. It ended up being great because I was such an ASUS fanboy that it was all I bought, and some other brands offer so much!
Every company makes decisions on policies, hiring, quality, etc., and as consumers all we can do is vote with our wallets. And to be fair, the money made from us pro-sumers is probably a small drop in the bucket for a company like ASUS, but that doesnāt mean we should settle!
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Yeah its a fine line between what a customer will and wont accept.
If a company doesnt correct soon enough customers will go elsewhere even if it costs more.
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