I'd say don't buy asus boards period. They're stuff is not what it used to be and customer support is a joke. Let's see - crappy asus product list me or my friends owned over the years:

- A7V600 - caught fire - first bad experience with asus stuff. Back then customer support was still ok and stuff like this got replaced quickly and w/o fuss.
- P4P800-X and P4P800 Deluxe - recommended these to a friend - they were bought in succession - died from sudden Asus death syndrome - most likely bad voltage regulator.
- P5K64 WS - blown mosfet - killed a brand new Q9550 (to be fair overclocking was involved, but when one spends a wad of ca$h on a high end board, one expects reliable overclocking). replaced with an MSI P35 Neo Platimum witch is still working to this day. Recently managed to fix the Asus board.
- P6T Deluxe no 1 - DOA
- P6T Deluxe no 2 - blown mosfet
- Asus K52? laptop - not mine, but a good friend's. Really flimsy cooling, GPU overheated, died. Sent to RMA twice. Had it sent back the second time as they claimed the damage was caused by overclocking (it was not overclocked) - threatened to sue, got money back after 3 months of waiting.
- Asus GTX 480 (ENGTX4802DI - blown mosfets (two of them!) - not sure I can blame Asus for this one (altough the Zotac AMP! I used as the primary card never had any issues - but used aftermarket cooling) as GTX 480 cards were known for running silly hot and blowing 'fets or cooking themselves.
- Maximus V Extreme - came with a new feature - bent socket pins out of the box! Sent back, got a new one two weeks later - died after 1 year. Overclocking and a 3770k were involved.
- 2x R9 280x DirectCU II TOP - artifacts, overheating, fan would not go over 40% regardless of temps. Had to make custom bios to fix issue - cards became VERY noisy but ran well - and don't give me shit about the 280 series, I still have my cousins 280x Windforce 3x and it works perfectly even after running at 1200mhz core for allmost two years.
- Asus Transformer T100TAL - flimsy construction, KB dock broke twice (LVDS cable in hinge) - outrageous replacement part prices, horrible customer support. Most recently the touchscreen started acting up registering fake touches along the edges.

MEH Asus products I've bought:
- Asus A7V880 (bought new in 2005? as old stock) - just recently went bad - two of it's memory slots stopped working

GOOD Asus products I've bought:
- 3rd P6T Deluxe - this one lasted YEARS w/o any problems whatsoever. Guess the P6T Deluxe belongs in meh category since I saw two dead ones before getting a good board.
- Asus ROG G751JY (mine) - have had it for over a year - no issues whatsoever, bought it at a great price, much cheaper then equivalent machines.
- Asus ROG G751JT (my cousin's) - bought a week after mine - still going strong.

Now after the P6T deluxe experience I more or less learned my lesson about Asus products and tried to avoid them as best I could. I only bought Asus stuff when they were clearly cheaper / better spec'ed then the competition or came in a good deal on second hand hardware. Same with my 751JY - I got that for 1700$ in december 2014 brand new, while the next cheapest equivalent was a MSI dominator for 2200$, with the exact same specs. Similar story with the T100TAL. I wanted a decently priced 2 in 1 with detachable KB and a build WWAN (3G) module. Other brands were either way more expensive or lacked a KB (tablet only) or lacked WWAN making the thing useless to me.

Its too bad to know that happened to you but i'm never had any serious issues even with low end asus motherboards
A7V8X-X had some strange behavior but it was psu fault
P5KPL still good running a Q8300
M2NPV-MX never had issues at all
M2N-X with time became unstable and later refused to boot but i fixed it changing 3 bloated caps near CPU socket
P8H77-M still working fine on my main rig
I have overclocked only with M2NPV-MX but just a little bit

MSI's new boards also look like garbage...

They switched from Samxon polymers and went to Apaq, like Asus and Gigabyte...

In fact, it now seems as though all the newest 1150 boards are manufactured by a single company, and they are just re-labeled.

Otherwise, have been buying MSI for years now, and they've never failed me.

VL/I-486SVGO, VL/I-486SV2GX4, P/I-XP55T2P4, A7N8X-E, Maximus Hero VI, ENGTX460, never had a quality issue with an ASUS product and they've all seen 3+ years of use with me personally, and then there's another bunch of builds for others.

They aren't impervious to issues that impact the entire market, like the capacitor plague, but their stuff is as consistent as it gets. So this X99 business sounds unlike them, but good to know about these revisions of that board.

I will never ever touch another Asus to tier motherboard again, I was one of the !@!@## who bought the Asus Streker Extreme on day one, it took them a year of bios tweaks before they released a stable one, the external LCD died the first week, the board only ran on 5 different kinds of ram if it wasn't listed as compatible on their website it would not run. the board cant use 4x 2gig DDR2 dims of any manufacturer same with 4x 4Gigs DDR2, the board didnt support the newer Core2quad architecture that came the year after so Q9450 was a no-upgrade, it was a top tier motherboard that overclocked far worse than a old Asus P5B, with less hardware support.

In the 5 years I owned it , it was never really 100% stable and ran way too hot.

There mid tier stuff is okayish , but it costs the same as Gigabyte , except gigabyte in South Africa comes with a 3 year warrentee that even covers lightning damage.

I tend to buy really cheap motherboards. Always uATX and close in pricing to budget Asrock boards. I used to buy Asrock, but these days Asus isn't much more expensive. I think all my three desktops run Asus motherboards. Also had little issues to be honest.

The only more expensive gear is all "retro" / older stuff.

Asrock has surprised me a few times, their Socket 939 stuff was never the fastest but it was pretty stable, I have been using a Asrock Z77 Pro3 with a Xeon processor for my main computer now for 2 years, really happy with it, its rock stable , but from the looks of things stability isnt as much a problem nowadays.

Only negative criticism I can give the Pro3 is that the Sata ports arent angled , but thats nitpicking.

Personally I'm quite happy with pretty much all Asus boards I've owned.

A7V600-X - good performace, stable, 400 MHz FSB
K8V - ugh, K8T800 chipset is just bad, but thats not Asus fault
A8N-E - NF4 Ultra, decent board
P4P800 Dlx. - great board, supports all s478 CPU, good overclocker
P4C800 - same as above, kinda weak VRM.... killed by overclocked Prescott
P5WDG2WS-PRO - the best 775 board IMO, runs very hot, but also great memory performance, overclocking capabilities, crossfire support... perfect
Maximus Formula - not bad, well, not so great either. Very strong VRM and cooling but slower than old 975X
P8P67 LE - excelent for the price, very stable, reliable
P9X79 Dlx. - also perfect.

No personal experience with X99 though.

I have worked in a repaircenter for multiple brands including Asus and they really have significantly fewer returns as many other brands so (compared to sold units) so from that point they actually make decent stuff. However like every brand they also sometimes fucked certain products up. The Asus P5K series motherboards for instance had severe bios problems that led to blown up boards since the voltage displayed was way to low and people tried to compensate for this in adjusting the voltages in Bios.. 😵

Overall I build alot of systems and advices lots of laptops from Asus without any issue sofar that can be related to Asus. The occasionally dead harddrive and broken LCD is not something to blame the brand for. Only thing the last years that seems to be an issue with Motherboards and Videocards is that they are badly affected by minor power drops or surges.
The office I currently work in is on a new industrial area where all eight companies start on the exact same time. This somehow caused the electricity to show a minor drop followed by a minor surge which set off all UPS's and did kill 5 motherboards and 2 graphic cards in half a year. Now the issue of the power surge has been resolved by the electricity company we haven't had any issues since even if all systems are really full of sticky dirt.

Nvm1 wrote:

I have worked in a repaircenter for multiple brands including Asus and they really have significantly fewer returns as many other brands so (compared to sold units) so from that point they actually make decent stuff. However like every brand they also sometimes fucked certain products up. The Asus P5K series motherboards for instance had severe bios problems that led to blown up boards since the voltage displayed was way to low and people tried to compensate for this in adjusting the voltages in Bios.. 😵

Overall I build alot of systems and advices lots of laptops from Asus without any issue sofar that can be related to Asus. The occasionally dead harddrive and broken LCD is not something to blame the brand for. Only thing the last years that seems to be an issue with Motherboards and Videocards is that they are badly affected by minor power drops or surges.
The office I currently work in is on a new industrial area where all eight companies start on the exact same time. This somehow caused the electricity to show a minor drop followed by a minor surge which set off all UPS's and did kill 5 motherboards and 2 graphic cards in half a year. Now the issue of the power surge has been resolved by the electricity company we haven't had any issues since even if all systems are really full of sticky dirt.

I call bullshit. When I worked in the field (2006-2010) dead Asus stuff was very commonplace - they break down at least as often as other big brands or more often - mostly their high-end stuff. Dead asus laptops = anything with an nvidia GPU and an AMD CPU. Not as many failures as HP tough.

mockingbird wrote:

MSI's new boards also look like garbage...

I like them a lot. Especially the Z170 KRAIT Gaming series I got for my sister. It's gorgeous.

mockingbird wrote:

They switched from Samxon polymers and went to Apaq, like Asus and Gigabyte...

In fact, it now seems as though all the newest 1150 boards are manufactured by a single company, and they are just re-labeled.

Otherwise, have been buying MSI for years now, and they've never failed me.

Me too. Haven't had a problem with MSI boards since the socket A era. I'm also quite fond of Asrock's high-end boards, especially the Fatal1ty series.

kanecvr wrote:

Nvm1 wrote:

I have worked in a repaircenter for multiple brands including Asus and they really have significantly fewer returns as many other brands so (compared to sold units) so from that point they actually make decent stuff. However like every brand they also sometimes fucked certain products up. The Asus P5K series motherboards for instance had severe bios problems that led to blown up boards since the voltage displayed was way to low and people tried to compensate for this in adjusting the voltages in Bios.. 😵

Overall I build alot of systems and advices lots of laptops from Asus without any issue sofar that can be related to Asus. The occasionally dead harddrive and broken LCD is not something to blame the brand for. Only thing the last years that seems to be an issue with Motherboards and Videocards is that they are badly affected by minor power drops or surges.
The office I currently work in is on a new industrial area where all eight companies start on the exact same time. This somehow caused the electricity to show a minor drop followed by a minor surge which set off all UPS's and did kill 5 motherboards and 2 graphic cards in half a year. Now the issue of the power surge has been resolved by the electricity company we haven't had any issues since even if all systems are really full of sticky dirt.

I call bullshit. When I worked in the field (2006-2010) dead Asus stuff was very commonplace - they break down at least as often as other big brands or more often - mostly their high-end stuff. Dead asus laptops = anything with an nvidia GPU and an AMD CPU. Not as many failures as HP tough.

Perhaps your perception and a bit rough. I can relate it to sold items which is not bullshit for this region of Europe. That their AMD notebooks fail more often then the Intel parts I can however not deny. The bottom line of their AMD notebooks seems to be build a bit too cheap at times. The only one having fewer failures in the notebook area overall was Toshiba. If you want failed motherboards then first it was ASrock which improved their quality alot last five years and later ECS which had some severe issues. Not to mention HP for which whole series of motherboards needed big rework. The topline Asus motherboards so far weren't that bad at all.

Maybe interesting, did/do you also notice that alot of Bios chips go bad lately, not only on motherboards but also in Notebooks within 2 years of service? It's getting a plague here right now and the only solution seems to change the whole chip. Really frustrating is that the complaints aren't directly related to chip but more in slowdowns, ram errors and unexplained blue screens.

It is quite possible that the reason I see more dead asus boards than any other brand is because the have the majority of sales. 1 out of 4 boards sold here are asus -> more boards sold, more returns - but the thing is over the years I've had lots of dealings with system built around their hardware and almost all gave me problems.

Nvm1 wrote:

Maybe interesting, did/do you also notice that alot of Bios chips go bad lately, not only on motherboards but also in Notebooks within 2 years of service? It's getting a plague here right now and the only solution seems to change the whole chip. Really frustrating is that the complaints aren't directly related to chip but more in slowdowns, ram errors and unexplained blue screens.

I have in fact. Lots of machines seem to brick after regular bios updates and can't be fixed unless you replace the chip. Must have something to do with how large UEFI bioses have become (up to 16MB!!! for z170 boards!)

I don't think Asus is any better or worse than most other hardware manufacturers, they all make cheap crap most of the time.

Kanecvr seems to have had a bit of bad luck with his P6T Deluxe motherboards. Some early boards were indeed bad because of Asus failing quality control and there were also performance issues with the SAS controller. Asus released the P6T Deluxe v2 without the SAS controller a few months after the first version.

The design of the Asus P6T series (all of them) is good though and most motherboards without defects are still alive today, it's a good choice when buying a motherboard second hand.

I think ASUS dropped the ball on both socket 2011-3 and 1151 boards. After seeing this isn't exclusive to ASUS I went with a 1150 for my Sandy Bridge replacement (got a 4790K + Z97-PRO).

ASUS has a pretty solid reputation for me. I still own most motherboards I've bought (sold less than a handful) and only a P4T-F has failed me (bad Nichicon caps).

The ROG series never were really a hit for me. I'd rather stick to the Pro/Workstation tiers than have those nifty extra controllers/PCIe ports that will end up being unused anyways.

Are ASUS Z170 motherboards as bad as this? I'm actually looking at potentially getting a Z170-A for my upcoming Core i7 build, but after seeing so many complaints regarding this board, particularly bad RAM slots breaking dual-channel RAM support, I may reconsider. If their boards are really that bad (I personally have had good ASUS hardware no matter the age except for my G750JW laptop running the CPU, a Core i7 4700HQ, INCREDIBLY hot with Intel Turbo Boost going and the CPU at full load, to the point where it reaches thermal throttling), what brand would you suggest? I've been looking at Gigabyte and MSI as well, but it seems even they have issues, particularly MSI.

I loved my ASUS Crosshair with a 590 SLI chipset, and my ASUS ROG Extreme IV was a great board that i dearly miss.

I've been reading about bad quality control with Asus for months now, ever since I started exploring motherboards for a Z170 build that I'll eventually get. A lot of people are having problems with getting working boards and trying to deal with their customer service. However, others have the opposite experience too. Seems like buying a current gen Asus board is like playing the lottery.

You also have to remember this, though. People are more likely to complain about something when they get a bad product / service than they are to praise a good product / service. This makes reviews also a bit skewed to the negatives. I don't doubt they are having a lot of problems as of recently, though.

I've never had any motherboards die on me that were connected to an UPS, except my EVGA SR-2 which my Corsair cooler leaked on.

sgraffite wrote:

I've never had any motherboards die on me that were connected to an UPS, except my EVGA SR-2 which my Corsair cooler leaked on.

Now I'm suddenly happy I never got to water cooling my main SR-2 system although I bought water cooling gear for it back in 2011!

I hope you took that Corsair cheap piece of crap water cooler outside and used it for target practise!