It Was a Beauty at one Time

Parting Ways Can Be Hard Sometimes

So your looking above at my build. This was an i9 9900k with an Asus Maximus XI Extreme board, custom water loop and later on I replaced the SLI 1080ti cards with an Asus RTX 2080ti. From the looks of this photo, you would easily assumed I am a happy camper and love what ended up to be the dream pc machine. Well if you really read the title of this post....we are about to head into a very different story that this picture I took a year back portrays.

Trust me if your a PC enthusiast like I am, a true adventurer of the PC building community, what I am about to tell you is a true horror story...only fit for the strong stomached that can handle one truth in this world....sometimes corporations will screw you constantly to a point you just have to say enough is enough and raise your voice. Because in the end my friend, these guys always seem to feel they have the upper hand in all situations.

So lets begin the awful journey my path with Asus has taken. What started for me as a true fan boy of this company is now definitely altered very permanent at the end of the path with them.

ASUS are You No Longer Our Friend?

So lets state this up front. There was a time I could honestly tell you go buy anything made by Asus. Years back, I never had a faulty piece of hardware I purchased by them and to further toss honesty at you, I almost always leaned to grab an Asus product above anyone else. So much, my house literally is corner to corner sitting on so much Asus gear my fiance probably wants me to start tossing some of it in the trash....and most likely that is coming soon anyways.

A shift happened for me around 2017 starting with the purchase of their gaming router...the Asus Rapture GT-AC5300 as pictured here:

This was a major purchase for myself. I was having a very good run in Cryptocurrency during this period and I decided to finally try to shoot for a router that can handle our households gaming demands. Literally everyone in my house is a gamer so we needed something proven on the internet at the time to be a beast of a router for our family.

When I got this product, oh man was I so happy with the unboxing. Literally the quality and weight of this things was truly what I thought I was getting on first glance but now 3 years later this thing has to be the worst router I have ever had experienced working with.

So lets start with the specs. This router came loaded with 3 Wifi Bands, one for 2.4GHz, one for 5.GHz, and one for the new 5GHz-Gaming. The Gaming one supposedly was for better bandwidth to tackle gaming on wifi but I have never experienced this because to this day, that band has never populated but once when I first booted up the router. We suspect that maybe it was damaged in shipping but I don't know, I have never heard back on the initial ticket I created back in 2017. Not sure if that one and the numerous others I sent in got lost in some void but I eventually just lived without the extra band due to believing maybe it was software issues and it just never returned on updates at all.

That was fine, on me there because I was a very busy fool in Crypto back in 2017 and money was coming and going so fast I just kind of lived with the broken band.

Well lets share with you the continued issues since. As soon as my warranty was up on this stupid router, I started to have issues after updates with the thing getting into a boot loop. And this happens so frequent when you update that I sometimes will lose the router completely for days until I can trick it into resetting via their Firmware recovery app. Its so poorly written this app that it sometimes can't even recognize its own official firmware is official and will tell me its not when I manually grabbed it from their site.

This router is junk, I don't know if I just happened on a bad one and due to lack of support I got stuck with it, but to me...I still have this thing and I still battle occasional boot loops that are so hard to fix. Yea its time to get rid of it, thats an upcoming purchase for sure.

STRIKE ONE ASUS...STRIKE ONE

When PC Dream Builds Turn into the Devil

So at this stage in my journey I really didn't have much to complain about with Asus. I know I should have followed up more with our router issues but at the same time, the lack of return on 3 support tickets does feel like this could have been corrected.

With that bad situation I didn't actually blame ASUS at all. I was still a fan boy, still buying new ASUS graphic cards, I even built a mining farm with their cards and not once had a failure of any of them. So as far I was concerned, me and ASUS were fine. Sure it was a rocky relationship, we had one issue but like all relationships you try to work through things and I was ready to build a new PC so come 2018, I chose my homie ASUS as my go to guy for the challenge.

If you remember in late 2018 I was posting on Steemit about this build. I was so excited to share all the details and honestly at first...all went smooth. I am not a newb when it comes to building PC's, I done this many time throughout the years and at this stage, when I build something it fires up right away 9 out of 10 times.

So I had the ASUS MAXIMUS XI EXTREME in this board so I can upgrade to the new i9 9900k that year. For about 8 months, no problems at all. Never touched the build, never pushed it too far, actually had a very modest overclock and with the cooling loops I had on it, I never seen the i9 9900k get hot at all. Averaged around 29 C idle, which is a huge feat for a 5GHz OC on the i9 9900k but that is the beauty of buying a binned and delidded CPU from Silicon Lottery.

Then it happened...oh boy did it turn out bad for this build out of no where.

One day, froze...I was on Google Chrome and the screen just locked in on a frame and I had no way to get movement with the mouse or CTRL+ALT+DELETE....so I had to force a reboot via the switch.

From that point on I was stuck with a MEMORY CC error. I went to ASUS and can you believe it took a month for them to respond? I guess thats good for me because they never responded to the router issue but this PC was actually at the time my work PC and I had to rush to rebuild my old i7 system just to keep working due to the lack of return on my ticket for that month.

At first ASUS was playing a little blame game with me. Basically I already had a ticket in for a USB issue that was popping up. They called it software related but looking back now, it clearly was the board having issues and starting to lose devices on its slow crawl to permanent death.

Finally though ASUS did RMA it. And here we go why I am starting to now look back and go, this company is just bad news. They RMA'd it okay. But when I got the motherboard back, with it claimed to have been fixed. I fired it up to find immediately the same MEMORY CC error was showing up. So basically it looks to me like they just took this in for repairs, didn't bother to touch it and just sent it back to me.

I was furious at this stage, and I began and open discussion on Twitter about this one. I just couldn't bite my tongue anymore.

ASUS then come to the conclusion that I needed another RMA, took another month, and during this situation. I was slightly concerned it might be the CPU from Silicon Lottery but due to this slow back and forth with ASUS my warranty lapsed with them and I couldn't get an RMA till we knew if the CPU was the reason or the motherboard was it.

So another month passes....

I know...I think we are getting into around mid 2019 at this stage with no fix when this first died on me around Dec of 2018 originally.

After sending this in for RMA...they finally look it over after a month and come to find out a pin was mysteriously bent on one of my memory modules on the board. How? To this day its a mystery to me seeing the RAM I put in is fine, and it sat in the motherboard for almost 8 months never being taken out so how does a pin just out of the blue break...heat I guess but I am not so sure that was really the problem.

To resolve this though, they sent back a full new replacement board. Problem solved right?

NOPE...NOT HAPPENING

In Memorandum

We are now here in 2020 and I am still dealing with this board's issues. Someone from ASUS wrote me in my email about incurring about my board and if the replacement fixed the issue. Well when I fired it up, it fixed the last error but now it sits on error A3 IDE ENABLED which is odd seeing I don't have old drives and it runs on an M.2 SSD and why I get no display is beyond me. I wrote back, informed them it didn't fix it but you know what...to this day nothing. I have not heard a single word back so I been sitting on a dead system for now going into 8 months.

Warranty is out so what I think is going on here is they sent me a bricked board, or maybe a refurbished that had no bios flash. I don't know I tried clearing CMOS, tried reflashing bios on both bios modes. I have tried to hook up an old drive with windows on it, even rebuilt the damn thing so many times at this stage I have gone through probably 10 tubes of expensive thermal paste.

No matter what I do, nothing stops it from being stuck in A3 error and nothing gives me keyboard or Display back. I am just sitting on a very expensive build that does nothing but collects dust.

So What Now?

Truly and honestly I am lost on this one. I have tried tagging these guys for help. I have pretty much given up on tickets because when I talk with live people they say warranty out and so much for your luck. Literally they held this fix up so long they ran me out of options to simply right a wrong they clearly had in this board in the first place.

I have since found out that all my peripheral devices attached to this board are working. I am knocked back down to my i7 machine and everything is hooked up to that and running just fine. Sure a little slower and sure I can't do work anymore that I used to do with my marketing in Crypto but I guess ASUS cares not about things like that.

I have come to the conclusion, these guys are no longer in care when it comes to making their customers happy. The amount of hoops I had to go through to end up in the position I am in, its just asinine stuff I wouldn't wish on anyone. Maybe I just ended up twice with bad luck but I am not shooting for a third so I am trying to raise up enough money to replace this dead system, get a new board and move on from ASUS as a customer for life.

I have heard horror stories about ASUS but I just thought it was something minor happening on rare occasion. I can tell you right now as a dedicated ASUS fanboy, this company has turned sour on us customers and I hope someone fixes it for future customers.

Anyways, I wanted to share this. Its the season for building new PC's and I just want to heed a little warning when your selecting your products. I hate to put a company down but this situation has been the worst one I have ever put up with by any entity out there. I maybe screwed on ever having what I built work but in a way I guess I never had it in the first place but for a little time period, been outdated faster than I was updated due to this so I guess its just time to move on and let go.

Gonna be fun smashing this board when I get a replacement, probably make a nice video of that later on lol.

All the best, you be careful with your purchases my friends, don't get in a headache like I had to all this time.
~sflaherty