Asus is currently in a bad spot, as they released a BIOS update as Beta, which should address an issue where their boards would cause a CPU to explode.
They did, however, leave the usual "this is beta, install on your own risk, this will void your warranty" disclaimer on, which currently backfires, as it seems as if Asus does not want to take responsibility. It is unknown if the statement was intentional , or just the usual disclaimer.
Another well-known channel stated that they used Asus for a long time, and noticed a decline in quality of the samples provided (as far as receiving boards that have been RMA'ed before), and also noticed that the RMA experience for average Jane and Joe has become worse. Asus also failed to negotiate further sponsoring the channel by simply not getting back to requests. As such, the channel completely canceled all business relations to Asus.
> this is beta, install on your own risk, this will void your warranty
I’ve seen an increasing number of products I own prompt me to join a beta program that, if accepted, voids the warranty of the device.
I help them vet early features before they roll them out to all of their users and, in exchange, they… ask me to let them maybe brick my device at my expense?
Just so you know, overclocking also voids warranties regardless of manufacturer or vendor recommendations. This includes AMD EXPO[1][2] and Intel XMP[3][4].
If you want warranty coverage, don't overclock no matter how much the marketing encourages you.
[2]: Overclocking and/or undervolting AMD processors and memory, including without limitation, altering clock frequencies / multipliers or memory timing / voltage, to operate outside of AMD’s published specifications will void any applicable AMD product warranty, even when enabled via AMD hardware and/or software.
[4]: Altering clock frequency or voltage may damage or reduce the useful life of the processor and other system components, and may reduce system stability and performance. Product warranties may not apply if the processor is operated beyond its specifications. Check with the manufacturers of system and components for additional details.
[2] and [4] sound like manual clock/voltage configurations, not the automatic OC of modern AMD CPUs or included XMP Profiles. Those are configs the manufacturer provided.
[2] is explicit, saying "even when enabled via AMD hardware and/or software." If it wasn't clear, it's the footnote in [1].
Overclocking has always voided warranties, it's why overclocking has traditionally been the realm of enthusiasts and tinkerers who generally aren't concerned with reliability, safety, or monetary value and know what they're doing.
The more mundane users really should be made aware that overclocking is tantamount to playing with fire, sometimes literally.
amd expo is covered by warranty. expo also does not overclock the cpu. that amd expo changed cpu voltage was a decision by asus, not by amd, the asus implementation is basically not up to spec.
Overclocking RAM involves overclocking the memory controller which resides in the CPU.
AMD themselves also make it clear that users who overclock "assume all risks and liabilities that may arise out of overclocking and/or undervolting AMD processors" per the footnote on their EXPO page.
Overclocking will void warranties, this is a fact that anyone who wants to overclock has to accept. AMD should be ashamed for hiding the literature behind a hidden footnote, but that doesn't excuse end-user ignorance.
expo won't void warranty. amd replaces expo'd processors. they make advertisments with expo. in the eu/uk they would not stand a chance to refuse any rma whatsoever when expo was enabled.
The disclaimer is there on the beta firmware pages on archive.org from a year ago, meaning that it was a general policy for beta firmware that had been in place for some time rather than something added specifically for this particular beta.
Why did this clause exist to begin with? Why should installing firmware that Asus itself publicly released void your warranty? I doubt that clause can even be legally enforced.
I can't say for sure but I'd guess it was put in place by the legal team as a form of ass covering, since betas aren't always tested as extensively and there's rarely a good reason for normal users to want to install them.
It's impossible to really know because we don't have mind reading capabilities, but he believes that their intention was never to void warranties for this.
I haven’t watched the content OP is mentioning, but Linus has a lot of industry connections so it seems very believable he’d be able to get in touch with someone who knows more about the situation.
You clearly never have worked in a large company. Changing a simple word can take weeks before it even goes to the translation team. Changing a disclaimer involves legal so expect a month of committee meetings before anything new is proposed.
A friend told me this story: He works for a large company as a software developer. He made a PR to change a compiler setting. It was rejected because the build team believed it would cause them to have to add more machines to the build fleet, and they hadn’t met with the finance team to discuss that, yet. I wouldn’t have thought that changing a compiler setting would require capital expenditures, but here we are.
When your friend makes a PR to change compiler settings, it becomes a committee meeting. If the executive director says "GET RID OF THAT LINE ON THE WEBSITE ITS HURTING OUR BUSINESS" it's a 2 hour meeting between leadership, engineering, and legal, and communications and its done.
The speed of the change is proportional to personal authority within the organization of the person requesting the change. When ASUS says "we're working on it" what they mean is "leadership doesn't give a shit".
I work for an extremely large organization. All it takes is someone in higher levels to decide this has to be dealt with now. The working on it tells you that leadership doesn't really care.
This sounds exactly why software companies need to have strict liability. Can you imagine a hardware/software combo that blows up something you own is acceptable?
I have been out of the hardware loop for quite a while now. The referenced Beta BIOS in the GN video (the first link) is from May 2nd, and Steve claims that the voltage is still too high, as it is the boards task to set the correct VSOC setpoint, as the EXPO profile doesn’t have one per definition.
(Only half valid knowledge, just reiterating what I saw)
Anecdote: I recently had a very good repair experience with Asus. Free and fast shipping both ways via Fedex -- overall turnaround in a week, and the issues resolved. Based on the repair experience, I wouldn't hesitate to buy an Asus laptop again.
Yes - well, EFI updates (you get, non-sarcastically, to guess at the reason for this design choice, but as a matter of fact it only supports the "EFI capsule" system popularized by AMI's Aptio and Insyde's H2O)
Anyway, if you're running Win8+ in EFI mode you'll see "Firmware" in Device Manager, which just like any other "device" in the list can have its "driver" upgraded, this unsurprisingly being a special case of driver: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/b...
And yes, if you know how commercial PC firmwares are made [cooperation between CPU/chipset maker and firmware corporation, who then sells the semi-finished product to the motherboard manufacturer - most famously "To be filled by O.E.M." :P ], some times it goes wrong, namely when two different designs get the same ID like the generic default: https://web.archive.org/web/20170101104905/http://www.minixf... (scroll down to post 10)
You do understand that this drama is for enabling them to get more views? Dude literally has two side by side mountains of free asus gear and is crying. The white motherboard, he doesn't say he bought it, he says he "requested" it and goes on to cry that his request for free shit wasn't handled properly. I ended up blocking his channel because sensationalist BS on youtube needs to die.
I do understand that there are channels out there doing drama for the sake of drama. I do understand that, after over 6 years of following now, JayzTwoCents and especially GamersNexus are no such channels. Furthermore, I do understand that if you have a business relationship with a sponsor, you request products which you will then show on your channel for the sake of reviewing. You are not getting it for free. Companies do get a review or visibility in return. That's how I do understand "sponsoring" and "marketing". So do you?
> Companies do get a review or visibility in return.
They get a favorable review or they cut the channel off. This is how media centered around consumable gear has always worked. Honest players aren't given early access or any at all so as to diminish their influence.
This is a good and healthy attitude to have and I do not want to diminish it. This is how I view all channels, generally.
In this case, at this time, Gamers Nexus is pretty well respected as an entity that re-invests its success in increasing technical validation capability, and has been cut off more than once by vendors, leading to having to purchase its own hardware. They currently have my respect and trust on this motherboard topic.
Jayz2Cents? His content is just not the same, but he does have a genuinely consumer-focused attitude, though.
Which is why Steve/Gamers Nexus often has to buy hardware to review on their own dollar. They're not the least bit shy about being critical when it's called for, which has landed them on the blacklists of some hardware manufacturers.
How can I expect take any reviewer seriously when they're getting paid by the people they're reviewing? It sounds like the guy in this video didn't get a sponsorship agreement and went scorched earth. I can at least respect Steve to some degree despite his constant negativity, that he will say what he feels regardless. I don't alway agree with the doom and gloom, but that's his style and it seems to work for him.
I could understand this Jay person being with upset with Asus if they had some skin in the game but getting upset about free merchandize is outlandish, especially when you're requesting gear to essentially give away which is exactly what he mentions doing. The level of entitlement is off the charts. I'm also unsure why he mentioned the box having all sorts of labels from China on it.
Here's the real irony. Just weeks ago this youtuber built themselves a rig with a 7950X3D, and given all the offerings available, they chose Asus. He even uses language in his rant to describe Asus as "seemingly solid". So the question is, what is this really about?
It's not "free merchandize", as I outlined quite extensively a few posts above.
Why he has choosen Asus is also explained in the video. He doesn't rant about Asus because he didn't get a sponsorship, he rants about them because they screwed customers over and failed to stand up for their mistakes in present and past.
It is for him. You don't get to complain about a product when you're not actually buying the product or when you are in fact getting paid by a product manufacturer to showcase their products under the guise of a "review".
He does rant about not having a sponsorship agreement with Asus. He clearly says all of his other sponsorship agreements finalized in Jan 2023, but that Asus hasn't.
He has no clue if customers have been screwed over because he's never been a customer, and if he is, let's say he used his own money to buy the Hero board he mentions in the video, why did he go Asus like 5 weeks ago for his own stuff if he thought they were bad products, or a bad company?
This sums up the entire ordeal perfectly, maybe it's backpedaling, but this doesn't seem like customers are getting screwed over.
It isn't legal for them to buy positive reviews in the UK.
They might have some problems with the Advertising Regulator, but their bigger problems would be with the Competitions & Market Authority. Misleading & deceptive conduct to sell your goods is illegal in the UK (and the EU & Australia and other places).
Negative reviews would seriously open you to being sued by the people you are review bombing..
I thought that deceptive conduct to sell goods is illegal everywhere, as that pretty closely matches the textbook definition of fraud ("gain through deception")?
The ACCC (https://www.accc.gov.au/) don't fuck around. They're basically the reason Steam started offering refunds for games that didn't work for example.
In the US, truthfulness of a statement is an affirmative defense to libel/defamation, but believe it or not, that is not the case everywhere. Specifically, it is not the case in the UK.
In the UK, you are expected to prove that it is true for the defense to work though, whereas in the US it's generally enough to be able to argue that you reasonably believed that what you said was true. Hence why the UK is a favorite location for celebrities/companies/... to sue compared to the US: It's a lot harder to defend reporting based on hearsay and indirect conclusions there.
Not sure why people believe this so frequently; it’s completely wrong. Truth is an absolute defence under both systems, though there are significant differences around burden of proof and importance of intent.
My limited understanding (not a lawyer, just a rando) is that truth may be an absolute defense to defamation in the US, but defamation isn't the only ground you want to cover here.
In particular, "public disclosure of private facts" seems to be illegal without the subject's consent in some states. [1] I can't tell if the effective law is significantly different in the UK, or whether the main difference is just the semantics of whether it'd fall under "defamation" or something else.
As mentioned elsewhere, the UK does _not_ have this, but there are libel systems, generally old-fashioned ones, where truth is not an absolute defence (a couple of US states still have criminal libel laws where truth may not be an absolute defence, though use of these presumably wouldn’t be constitutional, say).
i.e. Japan where even if something is true there needs to be an actual public interest in my publishing of it.
[1] > Under Article 230-1 of the Criminal Code of Japan:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”
Personally I like the UK model where the speaker is on the hook for knowing what they say is true. It shouldn't be too much to ask people to avoid making an unfounded claim ...
Italy has criminal libel laws where truth is not an absolute defence. It is routinely used to silence journalists. There is for example currently an high profile case involving Roberto Saviano being sued by the Italian PM.
There have been multiple calls to reform it as the law obviously does not conform to European and International standards, but I believe the reforms haven't gone anywhere yet.
Sure, you could give 100 people the competitors product, have them use it and then review it and just publish the negative ones. Maybe that’s also useful market research.
I don’t think that’s what most people buying reviews online do.
You actually are lying though, because the goal of leaving fake reviews is to intentionally mislead consumers to give the false impression of genuine experiences with the product. "Fake reviews" are "lying for profit" AKA fraud.
My dentist here in Canada has signs up that advertise that you get a free electric tooth brush if you leave a 5 star review on Google. I've not done that, it seems quite wrong, but I would imagine this is also very much against Google's policies? I was surprised how clear and obvious the signage was.
Seems to have worked though, the dentist's office has lots of 5 star reviews.
This sign always has the opposite desired effect on me. If I see a sign trading for 5-Star reviews, there isn’t any way for me to tell which reviews were written for a free burrito. So I immediately discredit all 5-star reviews the restaurant receives.
I do this anyway, I just don't trust rating systems so tend to remove the top and bottom marks.
Obv not a perfect solution and unfair to those who aren't gaming but over the top 5 star and bitchy one star reviews even when genuine aren't always that representative.
Last week I returned a borrowed suit and I was afraid to be late because it had been more than a week. The owner of the place told me it would be fine if I left a 5 stars review. Now I’m wondering how common this gaming is.
Asus used to be a great company run by great engineers, but in the last couple of years their motherboards have become terrible. By far the worst of the big 4.
Who is considered good right now? Asus was my go-to brand for quality, but I haven't looked in a decade or more.
I'm glad to pay a modest premium for reliability. I'd like parts which are well-tested, use high-quality capacitors, and have basic safety features (like over-current / over-voltage protection on power supplies).
What I'd really like is a review site which steps through the engineering of things like motherboards and power supplies, tests things like short circuits on the output, and checks which passives are used and quality of things like solder joints.
asrock hasn't been a subsidiary of ASUS for 20+ years, but its complicated because they're owned by Pegasus. Pegasus was created in a restructering of AsusTek, so its hard to say whether or not asus still owns them or not but at arms length. They're both companies that were spun off but the corporate structure is complicated.
and pegatron owns asrock, and asus is still the largest single shareholder in pegatron. so does asus own asrock? not entirely, not directly, but sort of.
Its sort of in their wikipedia. Pegasus was the production arm of asustek, was spun off into their own company, but asus is still the largest single shareholder but doesn't have a majority ownership. Pegasus owns Asrock.
I don't know about that. From my private email conversations with MSI motherboard team they seemed very… incompetent. They didn't know what the options they added to their firmware did and they didn't seem to understand how UEFI Secure Boot works (they thought it also works for non-UEFI OSes, somehow).
I have an MSI Z370 board. It does not support x8/x4/x4 PCIe bifurcation in BIOS despite chipset support, and using the latest BIOS it fails to POST with an Intel Arc GPU in the first slot. This latter issue is maybe defensible as Z370 doesn't technically have support for Arc, but I've read that 300 series boards from other vendors work fine, so I'm going to hold it against MSI anyways.
As much as I tried to believe in Asus' reputation in the past 20 years, I'm pretty much done with them.
2 of 2 mainboards (TUF and Maximus series) with random reboot issues, 1 of 2 GPUs with firmware issues causing BSODs, 1 of 2 routers (high-end models) with power supply failure problems and sometimes corrupting settings on reboot.
I agree completely. I replaced a 2015-era Asus Intel board with a 2021-era Asus Intel board of the same general product line (Prime) and found a great many deficiencies relative to their prior product. I had even moved "up" from the basic entry in the line. Many hassles and several missing features later, I am convinced not to purchase Asus again.
So who's better? Shopped around for ITX system and it seemed that if I wanted half-responsible firmware updates I'd have to get a SuperMicro and they don't really have what I had in mind.
Is the term “big 4” for motherboard manufacturers commonly used to refer to ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, like it is for the big 4 accounting firms?
I updated my motherboard with a latest bios version and any os i tried just crashed. All sorts of weird errors. Reverted and all worked fine (fine for an asus board means that it sometimes doesn’t post). I’d stay away from their motherboards.
My only reason for buying an ASUS motherboard was because, for a while, they had (as far as my research went a couple years ago) a complete monopoly on Thunderbolt 3-compatible AMD motherboard (ASUS ProArt Creator, IIRC?)
So does the entire group of “tech reviews” creators on YouTube. Finding an actual review of a product has become impossible, since most videos are just the guy basically reading the product landing page with some nice angles on camera. Ban this and the entire category disappears from YT.
With proper disclosure there may be some leeway, but I wouldn't just assume paying someone for a fake review is legal. UK advertising laws can be very strict in some cases (and rightfully so, in my opinion).
I don't know UK law, but at least in the US, there's a clear difference between "illegal" and "liable". There's a lot of stuff that's perfectly legal, but that I may be liable for.
IANAL. I understand that fake reviews are indeed against the law in the UK (Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008, etc.)?
But perhaps it's viewed as too loosely defined or hard to enforce.
In context here, liable:
1) Liable for claims that the fake review makes, i.e. held to the same standards as any other marketing/claims you make about your product,
2) Liable if you mislead consumers by making them think it's a real review.
"You are liable, i.e. you are the entity that may break the law"
The Digital Markets Bill may affect this in 2024 (?) - Not sure whether it will be more focused on regulating 'platforms'.
You're right that paid reviews may be legal if they're clearly advertised as adverts, as opposed to framed as impartial reviews. But walking that line is fine, right, because people expect reviews to be impartial.
Regardless, the legal obligation[1] to transparently advertise this is on the firm, not (just) the bought reviewer. IIRC the Advertising Standards Authority recently had a case on a social media paid promotion, which reinforced this. Regardless, IMO the statute is quite clear the obligation is on the firm.
It's just always surprising when companies think that legality and morality are the same thing. Either they didn't expect to get caught, or they see nothing wrong with it, that latter being worse.
The majority of companies that gets punished by consumers these days seem to me to be those who think that just because something is legal, then it's without consequences.
It is of course not legal, but practiced by everyone nonetheless. I mean, even 20 years ago all "awards" and other nonsense were just paid, different award figurines from different "review" sites arriving with the same sender address... Like after 20 years on a dating sites one may forget that they were supposed to pretend that they were looking for the "true love", people can forget it here too... Not even sure these lies are a benefit to anyone anymore, like people aren't dumb. It's more of a ritual dance.
It absolutely should be legal. But also, if you have to, everyone now knows you're actually garbage. All this does is expose how useless review/rating systems are.
Call it a free speech thing. Like bribing legislators. The business is speaking to the "decision making person" in the language of business : words of money.
It may not be "illegal" to buy positive reviews, but it definitely undermine the trustworthiness of their whole brand if they do.
I'll definitely stay clear of their product for the near future if they undervalue their product so much that they feel inclined to "cheat" their way back. Trust is hard to build and so easy to lose.
I worked at a startup, that was applying to be a B corp, where the CEO asked everyone to rate the product 5-stars. Gave them guidance on how to fill out the forms and what to write.
They did, however, leave the usual "this is beta, install on your own risk, this will void your warranty" disclaimer on, which currently backfires, as it seems as if Asus does not want to take responsibility. It is unknown if the statement was intentional , or just the usual disclaimer.
Of course, that PR statement doesn’t help.
Source: https://youtu.be/cbGfc-JBxlY
(There are more sources to it)
//Edit:
Another well-known channel stated that they used Asus for a long time, and noticed a decline in quality of the samples provided (as far as receiving boards that have been RMA'ed before), and also noticed that the RMA experience for average Jane and Joe has become worse. Asus also failed to negotiate further sponsoring the channel by simply not getting back to requests. As such, the channel completely canceled all business relations to Asus.
Source: https://youtu.be/wZ-QVOKGVyM