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.

  • fatalicus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    7 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.

    • keyez@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 months 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.

    • Nithanim
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 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.