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This undercover warranty investigation is a one-year follow-up from our series that investigated ASUS for motherboards incinerating AMD CPUs, at the end of which ASUS promised a number of improvements to its then-anti-consumer warranty processes. Spoiler alert: They’re still anti-consumer. We sent our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme in for warranty repair for issues with the left joystick (“drift”). The device also had a broken microSD card. ASUS then pointed to the world’s tiniest scratch and tried to charge us $200 for it under threat of sending back a disassembled device if we didn’t pay within 5 days. It felt like extortion. If you’re wondering whether ASUS is worth buying, the answer for anyone who values support should be “no.”

We have now tested ASUS’ motherboard and ROG Ally warranty and RMA processes. Both have been anti-consumer experiences.

    • tty5@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 months ago

      I’ve had good experience with EVGA both times I’ve had problems with their hardware, this year most recently. MSI is supposedly OK too, but I never had to deal with their warranty.

      • Sunny' 🌻@slrpnk.net
        1·
        5 months ago

        Heard good about EVGA and Sapphire too. However my personal experience with MSI(laptops) have not been great. But shame about Asus as they so much more than EVGA and Sapphire as they only make Graphic Cards AFAIK.

    • ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      0·
      5 months ago

      Specifically motherboards or in general?
      I’ve heard a lot of good things about Asrock motherboards. And they’re also about the only ones without some recent controversy (for AMD CPUs).

      In general, I can personally vouch for Noctua.
      They sent me a free mounting kit for my then 7 year old CPU cooler when I switched it over to a new PC. I’ve had it for 12 years now.

      Edit: Never mind, looks like also Asrock aren’t too great.

      • bfg9k@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        I got burned by ASRock years ago, they are literally just Asus but with less quality control

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
        0·
        5 months ago

        I don’t vouch for anybody at all but I enjoy my Gigabyte motherboard.

        EDIT: Now that I think about it, there was an auto-update firmware vulnerability, a potential backdoor, a couple of years ago that affected most of the new models, but my Aero G x570 was not on the list.

      • onion@feddit.de
        0·
        5 months ago

        I can tell you bad things about a crappy Asrock AM3 board I got a decade ago

        • ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
          0·
          5 months ago

          Yeah, from what I’ve seen they weren’t great before and have switched things up in recent years.
          But I haven’t had any personal experience with their boards.

        • Delphia@lemmy.world
          0·
          5 months ago

          From what I heard Asrock became a joke quality wise and got the shits about being the lowest quality mainstream manufacturer and did something about it.

    • Nithanim@programming.dev
      0·
      5 months ago

      Gigabyte Aorus maybe? Some years ago I sent in my MB that suddenly stopped working via the store I bought it from. No issues. Repaired and fully functional since.

      I sent in another one after for a very weird issue. Long story short, I think something is slightly broken with the RAM slots but since it happens “only” sometimes (depends on how hardware is plugged in; and also randomly), they could not find any problem and sent it back as “OK”. So I am only partial disappointed. Process was without friction and charge.

      The board that still currently drives my computer is asrock. Won’t buy them again because they put the cooling fan directly below the (hot) grapics card, made accessing m.2 real shitty and were missing a uefi feature I thought was standard (from gigagbyte; which graphics to use for init).

      All my boards fall in the highend category, but not the absolute top. Also, I am in the EU.

      • fatalicus@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        Gigabyte has been selling motherboards with a backdoor vulnerability.

        And during the GPU shortage a couple of years back they, together with newegg, sold GPUs only bundled with PSUs, but the PSUs were so bad quality that they literally blew up, and if you tried to RMA the PSU they refused unless you sent back the GPU as well.

        • Nithanim@programming.dev
          1·
          5 months ago

          Oh, yeah, the PSUs. Forgot about them since I wouldnt buy them. As long as they do not enshittyfy their mainboards…

          As far as I remember it was partly windows fault too for loading this? I don’t have windows so I think i forgot about that too.

  • Statick@programming.dev
    0·
    5 months ago

    About 7 years ago… Friend and I built PC’s about 6 months apart, him first, then me. Same ASUS motherboard. 2 years go by and his motherboard just dies. Few months later, mine dies. They honored the Warranty but the RMA process was awful. Little to no communication and it took a month for each of us to get refurbished motherboards back. I have not used a single ASUS product since.

  • JCreazy@midwest.social
    0·
    5 months ago

    A year or so ago ASUS repaired my video card for free that I had bought second hand and was a couple years of warranty so my limited experience with their customer service has been pleasant.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    im truly dissapointed by asus’ enshittification.

    it used to be THE goto motherboard many moons ago