ASUS bashing? Huh? That was being kind to them!
Seriously now, of all the motherboards we have dealth with in recent years, ASUS have been the worst. I mean it: clearly the worst of the lot.
Note, however, that we generally try to steer clear of the known crap manufacturers: PC-Chips and the various other no-name low-life scumbags around, so saying "ASUS are the worst" might not mean that they are worse than that BargainBonzo SuperCheap you picked up at a swap meet last weekend, just worse than any of the more-or-less reputable brands we deal with, and have seen a sensible number of in the last three or five years. I'll list the ones that occur to me, though doubtless I'll miss a few.
* Gigabyte
* Albatron
* Asrock
* Epox
* Biostar
* MSI
* A-Bit
* Soltek
* FIC
Come to think of it, though, there is one brand that we have handled in the reasonably recent past that demonstrated a roughly equally poor reliability record, and that was A-Trend - and, as we all should know by now, A-Trend is yet another PC-Chips alias.
Since the days of Socket 7, we have had nothing but trouble with ASUS.
We bought some ASUS Athlon Classic boards because all the overclocing types said they were the best and could we get one in for them. So far as I remember, not one of those boards ever actually went faulty, though we sold maybe six or eight, and a similar number of the follow-on Socket A board for Thunderbrds. But every single one of them gave us setup problems. Yes, every one. The plug and pray system on those things was an absolute disaster. This was back in the days of Windows 98, remember, and lots of boards required that you fiddle around a bit to get the IRQs sorted out, but these ASUS horrorshows were a complete bitch. Sometimes it would take hours to do a simple Windows reinstall, and in a couple of cases, days. I'm not kidding. So far as resource allocation goes, they were far, far worse than any other motherboard I have ever worked on, before or since.
We tried one each of the ASUS SiS-based entry-level Celeron/PIII board. Both were faulty, right out of the box. We got them replaced. After the standard 8 to 10 week ASUS wait, they came back. One was still faulty, the other worked for a couple of years before it failed. We have seen one or two of these boards not bought here too, and they also camre into us faulty.
Various others came and went. There was a late-model Thunderbird / early model Athlon XP ASUS board that (I have no idea why) we sold two or three of, and had at least one of them fail spectacularly. The replacement took three or four months to arrive and was DOA. The replacement replacement seems to work OK but I'm afraid to trust it.
And finally, there is the most recent crop of over-priced, under-engineered ASUS junk. For some reason not known to god or man, all the overclockers and heavy-duty gamers went bananas about an ASUS Nforce II-based board a while back. They were overpriced to buiggery and seemed to offer no advantage over similarly-specced boards from quality manufacturers such as (for example) Gigabyte, but the gaming morons insisted that that was the board they wanted and, like a fool, I got boards in for them. We sold somewhere around 8 of those boards, and most of them gave at least minor troubles. (In this context, a "minor" trouble is making one to three trips into the workshop with stability complaints. Typically, by the time we had the third different set of RAM in them they would decide to start working more-or-less reliably. Either that or their owners just got tired of complaining about their unreliable systems and stopped bringing them in to us. But there was a good deal more to the recent-model ASUS saga than that. Several of the boards (I forget the exact number, but roughly one-third of all the boards we sold) had major problems requiring RMA service (complete, of course, with the usual interminable ASUS shipment delays). One of them went back three times before the owner finally gave up and sold his system off to some poor unsuspecting victim and bought a Gigabyte board — which worked flawlessaly right from the start, of course.
The long and the short of it, ASUS are the most over-priced, over-rated, over-hyped bundle of junk it has been my misfortune to work with in the last five years.
