Maximum PC

Back when I first started in PCs (about 15 years ago now) I had always heard that Asus' products were considered to be some of the better equipment around and their support easy to deal with. Which is why I when I started looking at various components for my builds there was almost always Asus parts in there somehwere be it in the motherboard, sound card or the video card there was typically an Asus part in my builds. I would frequently recommend them to friends and forum goers when suggesting parts for their builds. I will no longer be doing that for video cards at least though due to my experience with them in dealing with my Asus EAH4870 DK TOP (short for HD4870 Dark Knight TOP edition) and getting it fixed. Full details on getting it fixed are located in the forums in this thread viewtopic.php?f=36&t=107975 . This issue is STILL ongoing at this point since the card that I received back from them yesterday that they supposedly replaced the chipset in has the same issue as I sent it off with. Namely after approximately 15 hours of use (sometimes less) it will stop sending a signal to my monitors forcing a reboot. If I look at the diagnostic LEDs when this happens DE1602 & D601 are lit indicating voltage issues. Yes I have replaced the PSU and I have also used another video card, an eVGA GTX260 SSC Core 216 to be specific, during the entire time that the 4870 was with Asus and it had zero issues. Here are my issues with Asus RMA & Support Departments:

1) If you call them during their normal business hours and they have backed up phones they will have somebody come on the line and state as much and get your phone number for a tech to call you back. This is all well and good except their technicians never call you back. I have had this happen on three separate occasions and each time I do not get a call back. I can bring up my call history via Comcast and show that I have never received a call from you Asus.

2) Your "live" support site has been down for weeks undergoing maintenance and as of this posting I still show that it is down. I can understand that sites have to go through maintenance. Heck these forums have had to go through maintenance during which they were down for a day or two. But weeks for a vital contact point for your customers is inexcusable.

3) I don't know what your procedures are for troubleshooting but I would seriously consider re-evaluating them and making some major modifications to them. The first time through your RMA system your technicians supposedly could not find any issues with my video card at all. As such that same video card was sent back to me. How they could have failed to recreate it when I gave very specific information as to how often it happened is beyond me. The second time through your RMA system they supposedly now found the issue and thought by replacing the chipset (which chipset they were talking about I do not know, the GPU, memory, voltage regulation or other chipsets) they would fix the issue. Well it didn't so now I have to go through the process for a third time which is inexcusable.

Asus, you seriously need to consider looking at your video card support process and your RMA process as you have some serious issues. It was reported to me on the Anandtech forums that it took another forum goer three months before he finally had a working card. I dismissed that as a fluke since I figured that any company could have a case or two where this has happened. I'm afraid after my experience and finding more occurrences where this has happened for other customers that it may be closer to the norm than I would like to think. At this point it's going to be very close to three months since I started this whole process on July 31st. If Asus has a representative on these forums that would like to contact me he would be more than welcome to do so through the private message section or by posting in this thread. If you wish to call me on the phone on this issue that's fine as well, simply private message me and I will provide my phone number to you once I have established that you do indeed represent Asus.

I really do hope that Asus sees this post and works on resolving these issues. Until I have proof that their RMA & Support procedures have changed for the better though I will stop recommending them for any components.

Asus sucks ass, and it's a shame really. Check out their resellerratings.com page, it's horrendous! And yes, I do rely on resellerratings.com a lot, as they've helped me tremendously.

You know, I've heard all kinds of bad about their video card support too. It might be handled by a different division than the motherboards and sound cards.

I had an Asus P5Q3 die on me, and I RMAd it. First I had the lines full thing happen to me, but I was promptly called back. So I got the RMA number, sent the board back in, and got the same board back and they said they had repaired it and it passed all tests. I put it into my computer and nothing was changed. Needless to say I was fairly angry, so I called again, and got extremely helpful support. When I told the rep what happened, he admitted that it happens a lot and set up a Cross-ship RMA for them to ship me a brand-new P5Q3. He even sent me a prepaid FedEx label so I wouldn't have to pay for shipping the board back. They completely redeemed myself in my eyes at this point, as they made a mistake but fixed it promptly and without it costing me anything.

And I've heard plenty of similar stories with their motherboards and laptops, but I don't think I've ever heard a good story about Asus' video card support. Strange stuff.

I have two ASUS 1005HAB netbooks. The second one I bought for my wife, came right out of the box with a dead power adapter. After two weeks of going through "have you checked that there is power to the outlet?" and "Make sure the adapter is plugged all the way into the computers power port." AFTER explaining to them that the computer runs fine on the other power adapter, and this adapter won't power up either of the two netbooks, they give me my RMA and tell me to put the entire system into it's original box and send it in. I tell them "You haven't been listening to my explanations, and you've forced us to run two computers by swapping adapters for two weeks now. My wife has gotten used to the computer now, and you want me to tell her she's going to have to be without it for however long you decide to take shipping it back? Why can't you just send me a new power adapter?" When I was researching into the problem, there are forums all over the place, even on ASUS's own, complaining about these adapters crapping out. They know the things are junk but still give people the run-around.

I finally decided to just go out and buy an aftermarket one.

When I called them when I first got my netbook (over a year ago and around the debut of this model), I had this same problem except it was caused by overheating.

They told me they had none in stock and would take at least a month for THEM to get one. From there, it was first come, first serve and I wasn't even close on the list.

I put my adapter in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes and has worked great ever since.

I had to ship out my notebook since the mobo died. Shipped for free and was fixed for free. The only complaints were they took the original box it came in (with another model box) and it took a few weeks to get it back. However, this was during the winter season.

Well I'm going to put to classify this as a closed out case as the issue has finally been resolved. I now have a GTX260 Core 216 based video card from Asus running in my machine that has been running stably for a couple of weeks now. I can't in good conscience though state that this warrants enough to take them out of the pound as it took way too long to get a working replacement that resolved the issue, it was almost like they didn't want to replace the card. It seems that this RMA activity is kindof isolated to their video card support though and folks that need to have a motherboard replaced typically don't have the same issues. So if you're reading this post I would really only be wary about purchasing Asus video cards as it seems that they're handled by a completely different department than their other products.

Buy from Newegg NSA. If anything goes wrong it's often more easy to return it to the reseller rather than battle anyone's tech support. Even with reported "good" techsupport, it's often a short checklist of the obvious stuff and they still just give you an RMA. But I do understand that support sucks for Asus, however they're not alone.

I had a brand new ASUS MB two years ago (fresh out of the box), with a bad memory controller. It took 5 days on the phone with them to get it narrowed down to that, so they issued me an RMA. Once I shipped it back to them it took them 4 months to get me a new MB. It was brand new out of the box. I love their products, but I bet my next MB will be an EVGA because they (ASUS) don't know how to treat their good customers.

I've had my own experience with Asus RMA hell, after the mobo in a friends new build crapped out I did the support since I built the system, after several calls emails etc to Asus to get the process started they were "not convinced" that my troubleshooting skills were all there, was a P6T-SE board, blown caps for some odd reason with a stock clocked i7 920.

After a few weeks of this crap, I did finally send them the board with a note not to send a new one as it got replaced by a Gigabyte, system's been fine ever since.

thanks everyone for letting me know of how bad asus customer Support is, now I'm not buying that GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) from them.