Asus motherboard? -- never again!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 07:29:50PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> In 2005, I put together a computer with an Asus M2V motherboard. It
> ran for three years and, minutes after the expiration of the warranty,
> died with a series of cascading bus errors.
> 
> Well, hardware failure happens. I bought an Asus M4A78 Pro to replace
> it, dropped it in, and got it to work. It ran for just over thirteen months,
> when it failed, again with Linux reporting a string of bus errors. That's
> too soon, so I called up Asus, got an RMA, and sent it back. There was
> a quick turnaround: about eight days later I had a new replacement
> M4A78 Pro, with a note that the one I'd sent in was, indeed, no good.
> 
> I dropped in the new motherboard, and it booted up with most things
> working -- just not the ethernet  chip. A bit of googling turned up the
> information that this isn't uncommon, so I installed a PCI ethernet
> card, with some annoyance. That was Monday.
> 
> On Tuesday, it would not boot at all. Rechecked cables, power supply,
> fiddled with the RAM, nothing. Eventually I gave up and took it over
> to Filtech for them to check it out.
> 
> You guessed it: The "new" replacement motherboard was completely
> dead.
> 
> I told them to put in a new motherboard. They proposed a fancier Asus
> model. Not a chance. Let's see if a Gigabyte will do any better -- it
> would have to work at it to do any worse (two days!).

Gigabyte caused me enough hassle trying to help people with their
computers that they are not on my list anymore.

> I know any given component can fail. But that's too many, too quickly,
> including one sent straight from the company. No more Asus products
> for me.

Well so far I have never had an Asus board die on me ever.

I have however also never bought anything with an ATI chipset.  I don't
trust those.  The M2V is a via chipset.  Those used to be reliable.
I still use a K8V board (socket 939 rather than the newer socket AM2).

Of course the other possibility is that you have a power supply killing
your boards.  It can happen.

Given the reputation Asus has among technical people, I actually would
suspect some other part of your system is causing the problem.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists