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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Cheap out on a lot of things in a build, never the PSU
I'll also argue you shouldn't skimp out on a motherboard.
I once owned an Asus Ranger VII. When I turned it on for the very first time, it lost its magic dust, and fried my RAM.
RMA found the MB was faulty, so they covered the RAM too.
This is from ASUS too, so I can only imagine how the chances of this sort of accident rises as you reduce the cost.
I don't think I'll ever buy an asus board again. I've had so many problems over the years with their boards. I used to think they were quality
I gave up on Asus after a motherboard went up in (literal) flames when a cap blew a month into owning it. The RMAed it and the new one was DOA. They blamed my power supply and wouldn't do a second return..
I bought an ASRock and it ran flawlessly for 5+ years. Yeah...it was definitely the power supply that was the problem, Asus..
Wow that's pretty extreme. I found their RMA process to be pretty shitty and I didn't quite have those terrible issues. I did have to send I think 3 different boards back to them. They were slow and required a lot of communication to get it done. It's been years ago so I forget details but I remember each time, until the last time, thinking I just had bad luck.
My story was from 15+ years ago when I was less knowledgeable and assumed Asus was the best because people on [H] said so. Afterwards I looked into it and found tons of people having similar RMA woes and I learned to research further than the HardOCP community forum lol
Haven't bought an Asus product since so I have no idea if they're still bastards
Gotcha. My issues with Asus spanned from probably about 1999 to 2018. I think they are probably still bastards. I too have owned "lesser" boards that seem to all universally be less troublesome than Asus ones were
ASRock was an Asus spinoff but was later bought by Pegatron (which is part of the Asus holdings).
Well the spinoff seems to be better
Yeah, it's weird because often enough the spinoffs may even share some infrastructure, but it's the pricing and support that are different.
Another good example is Virgin Mobile, which belongs to Bell, but their pricing and service are generally better.
Pegatron sounds like it’d be the sex worker Transformer
No that's Dildotron
Their laptops are equally shit.
Fucking thank you! I feel like I am taking crazy pills when these kids start praising ASUS "quality" and my 20 years in IT and 30 years of being a PC building lad has taught me that Asus and acer are some of the cheapest, most garbage crap you can buy.
I'd go 1. Acer 2. Asus 3. Dell
That's just from my experience. Acer are the most wank I've ever had the misfortune to come across. Asus are little better, but slightly. Constant overheating, super noisy laptops. Dell was almost as bad (if not worse in some ways) in that they were stuttering and super loud. How can you produce gaming laptops, send replacements which still have the same issues? Oh right, because it's inherent in the models. How no one picked up on it is beyond me. Return the third one I got and never thought about getting one ever again.
Went for a MacBook and never looked back. My Switch, Xbox and Deck do me for games.
I'd agree with that completely. I'm on a Dell now that I LOVE but it's one of their top of the line XPS that was meant to go up against the Macbook. My work Latitude is a festering pile of dog shit. I constantly am overheating and locking up solid. The fan never stops running, and I've had to open it up twice to clean up the fan vents so the cooling system could pathetically grumble along. The thing probably needs the cooling system lapped and thermal paste re-done but that's way more work than I'm willing to do for a work machine.
And way more work than should ever need to be done on a laptop which needs to work out of the box. I think I had a G7 or something... painful having to reinstall Dota each time just to find that the replacement was also crap.
XPS are the exception to the rule of Dell's quality, really. I guess the Precisions were also half decent, but I never bothered with them - they were ThinkPads but worse for the same price. Everything else is mediocre to bad.
What brands do you recommend for laptops?
Buy a specific laptop. Not a brand. Brands are a guide at the very best but are generally no indication of how YOURS will work. Also don't buy brand new models. Get something that's been out for a few months or longer. Read the reviews and people online who were dumb and bought it when it was brand new. Hell, even get a refurbished model because you know a human being has looked over it from top to bottom and replaced the weakest part that already broke.
I know it's all antidotal but I've been running Asus boards in my PCs for years and I've never had a single problem.
*anecdotal
Also, when someone wants to say science is wrong because they've personally seen different, it's "anecdata" (that's not an official word but I like it 😂)
I haven't had any problem with their boards either, but that's a sample size of less than half-a-dozen, strictly AMD-based mobos. Really not definitive, and I believe the people who say they've gotten multiple bad Asus boards.
In the end, it's down to luck. Every manufacturer sends out some percentage of products that have undetected faults or are damaged in shipping. What that percentage is depends on QA and product design. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Asus had some boards with design issues that led to high failure rates, while others are solid.
My sample size is 1. And it sits under my desk since 2018 along with a "be quiet!" PSU inside a Fractal R6 and doesn't give any indications of giving up soon. Only issue I had in all that time was that I couldn't OC the RAM which I gave up on since the rig was fast enough for anything I wanna do.
OTOH a friend of mine was complaining about his Asus notebook a lot recently. The keyboard illumination wouldn't work anymore from one day to the next (he blamed a windows update), a speaker was snarring and the fans were on constantly.
My sample size is three, with the current one being an X399-A first-gen Threadripper board bought on Black Friday of 2017. The only issue I've had that could be attributed specifically to that motherboard was lack of Linux kernel support for the onboard it-87 sensor chip variant at the time I bought it.
Your friend's notebook sound like everything except the mobo is breaking on him. 😜
Man I thought so. It struggles to boot if I have kt keyboard and mouse plugged into the same USB set. So I can use one of USB2 and one on USB3, but not both on either
I had an ASUS GPU do the same thing once, never had that happen before with any other brand.
I think Nexus and Jay found a lot of Asus products had problems.
The only thing that you can really cheap out on is the case. With all the other components cheaper should just mean getting a lower spec component from an A-brand. Buy a cheap cpu/ GPU/ mobo from Wish or AliExpress you’d get crap.
I think the point is. If you buy a cheap GPU it'll either be a fake (lower spec with borked firmware) or lower spec branded. So the worst that happens is you have lower FPS, or it just doesn't work. Same with all other components. They're rarely off spec to the extent they will damage other components.
But a cheap switched mode PSU? Yeah the failure mode of switched mode supplies without proper protections is a high voltage on the rails feeding your components. They can take out your board, GPU, Drives and depending on what protections the mainboard has, the CPU and RAM too. Not to mention your precious RGB!
I remember back in the 90s/2000s we had a "server" where I worked at the time. I say "server", the company cheaped out and had a high street PC builder make them. They were essentially desktops in a bigger box with expensive CPUs and things like tape drives. But yes, they cheaped out on the PSU and it popped. It took out a £1k Tape drive, about the same value in hard disks, and pretty much everything else that was connected.
It was not cheap to get that back up and running, I can tell you.
I'd argue don't cheap out at all, and acquire high quality components over a period of time where it's affordable. You can build yourself a PC to last the next fifteen years instead of 3. I'm on a first generation i7 still playing modern games at moderate settings, because I poured $1700 into it back in 2011. I am finally upgrading this year to AMD's newest socket AM-5 with a 12 core chip, which will hopefully be useful for another decade or more.
The old PC even survive a lightning strike, the power supply I selected took it like a champ and sacrificed a bunch of MOVs to save the PC.
6 years on a Ryzen 1600 with an Asus Mobo now. Intel before. Best buy I ever made in my PC-history, apart from my curved WQHD Monitor. Not playing very much but games like CS2, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Far Cry 5, Yakuza 0, Ghostrunner, Witcher 3 run very well on moderately high settings (Most of them on Linux). If I'd invest in a good AMD graphics-card, I'm convinced I could play most modern games on high settings.
Congrats for going the AMD route. You will be so blown away by your 12-core monster.
Like the first thing I learned about building a pc.