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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.

  • @Nithanim
    0•1 month 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
      6•1 month 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
        1•1 month 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.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 month ago

        They did push new firmware about 10 days later to fix that vulnerability, and that portion was easily disabled until and after the patch. I remember that coning out as I’ve only had gigabyte boards for the last 12 years in 4 PCs and they’ve been great.