Does anyone here have any experience of rusty chokes on current Asus motherboards? There is a story at Semi-Accurate that has put me off buying a new motherboard today. It appears to involve water having contaminated iron core chokes during manufacture, resulting in them rusting inside their protective lacquer covering.
"The models known to be affected include the P5P43TD, the P5P43TD Pro (Intel P43 chipset), the P5G31D-M Pro (Intel G31 chipset), the M4A785-M and the M4A785D-M Pro (AMD 785G chipset)" Just checked my X58 board.. no sign of it (12 months old)
Probably just a bad batch. It could really have happened to anyone and I am sure you would have to be very unlucky to get one of the affected boards. Doesn't sound like a reason to avoid Asus.
ASUS board quality and service matches the ones that makes ultra low end boards. Like many I though ASUS was the best of the best, but since 2006, it's cut cut cut cut cut on everything. When they start using cheap stickers made from a label maker (this is from a friend motherboard ), to mention the model name of a board on it, it's sad.. My recommendation is Gigabyte or MSI. I build a computer for my brother recently, and I picked a non-overclocked aimed motherboard for his Core i7 860, but with USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps on it. The BIOS has more overclocking features AND options than MY ASUS motherboard which was top of the line, back then. The manual is very descriptive as well. Here is a made up example, to show how my ASUS manual compares to Gigabytes, as I don't have both manual with me with me. The POINT is just to give you an idea on how it compares.. don't look for correctness on this example) ASUS: Mem Clk freq: -- Change the Mem Clk Freq value. Gigabyte: Mem Clk Freq -- Change the Memory Clock Frequency, possible values are from 100 to 400. Increase voltage to stabilize the memory, if the system is unstable after overclock. Set value to Auto, to use memory default value. The thickness of the gigabyte manual matches the one from ASUS.. the only difference is that ASUS cover 8 languages, while Gigabyte's is all in English. The board quality is impressive, the last time I was this impressed, is when I got my Corsairs HX620 PSU, and the first time with my Corsair RAM (I used to have value RAM value pack... the worst of "values")
I wouldn't be so sure about it, read below: "High-quality chokes are made from ferrite, which doesn't rust, while motherboard makers may use cheaper chokes made from iron in their low-end and mid-range boards to reduce costs. This suggests that owners of Asustek's high-end boards aren't likely to be affected by this issue, but that still leaves the cheaper (i.e. the high-volume) segments potentially exposed, meaning Asustek could face a large number of RMA cases down the road." http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100122VL201.html "The chokes are clearly labelled C.S and from what we’ve been told, this is a brand exclusively used by Asus on some of its motherboards." http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/18/mystery-rusty-chokes-part-deux/
You may wish to google ferrite chokes, see what they are and what they are used for before putting too much faith in the Digitimes article.
For the chokes to have rusted does that mean they have been in a dampish atmosphere? The inside of a pc case is not usually a moisture rich environment. Anyone got any thoughts? Littlexanth
WTF? Ferrite is iron. It's the purest kind of iron you can get and so it is just as likely to rust as any other kind of iron alloy.
no, ferrite is NOT iron (Fe) but iron oxide (Fe2O3, Fe3O4) instead. seems you haven't listened to chemistry lessons at school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_(magnet)