Motherboards Are P67 boards 100% reliable-out-of-the-box?

It may be my imagination, but are the Asus S/B P67 Deluxe/Pro boards proving to be a bit unreliable in their early versions (and I appreciate its an imperfect world and problems occur), versus Gigabyte or MSI; someone on another thread quoted Scan staff as saying "they're getting a lot of returns/problems with the Asus boards". That comment worried me immediately.

I really wanted to build an Asus-based system, but I'm now nervous about encountering problems that are showing up in the boards themselves. It's one thing to forget to connect a PSU connector or incorrectly mount a cooler, but its something else when the board could be inherently "not 100% reliable" or "prone-to-day 1-issues" out-of-the box?

Am I being unrealistic/unfair, or is there no smoke without fire here...?

Thanks.

 

Why?

 

Because they're a good brand? Personally I have a soft spot for EVGA

 

A genuinely valid question and gets straight to the point. You're not limited for choice on the market so why the self restriction? (Genuine interest, not judging your choice).


I think the major issue at the moment is that it's a completely new range and new hardware. It seems that there's a lot of BIOS tweaking going on across all the manufacturers atm. If you're really concerned, wait until the second generation of sandy bridge boards or just keep an eye on the BIOS updates and the release notes for them.

 

Me too, EVGA and Corsair for me all the way...

 

Well, the simple answer is because it seemed to have generally HAD the best reviews, and has (the Pro anyway) the right combination of functionality etc. that I'm looking for.

Eventually, everybody decides they want one board or another right? I probably shouldn't have said I REALLY want to build with an Asus board?

That said, my question stands; are the comments about seeing a number of Asus returns representative, or are the manuf's having similar problems (I haven't seen any evidence of this). I just want to avoid as much as possible issues with the build. I can't wait for the 2nd generation boards (unless they're no more than a few weeks away) as I need to build the new rig for some heavy video/photoshop/editing work.

 

I have the pro version. The bios update fix alot of the teething problems. SB doesn't really on the board for overclocking as much as the older Intel chips. The gigabyte UD4 is an awesome board aswell.

 

It seems very early boards shipped with early BIOS that were crap. There has been a LOT of updates in the last few weeks from all manufacturers which have fixed many issues and compatibility. Maybe call the store and check if they can update the BIOS before sending it out?

 

That was my impression really, the complaints have lessened significantly as the updates have been released. I'd say that you're safe if you need to build now, just update to the latest BIOS asap.

What's really telling is the percentage of sales that have been returned. Whoever sells the most will almost always have the most returns in terms of number.
That said, I seem to remember reading somewhere that Asus is one of the best companies for this as a whole, HP being one of the worst. (Was related to Laptops).

 

That's an extremely valid point, if you sell a thousand of one make versus 20 of another, you're likely to see, in absolute terms, more returns of the big-seller. Only wrinkle of course is that that view assumes the various manufacturers are all designing and building to the same quality/standard...

 

It does assume the same level of quality, yes. But amongst Gigabyte, MSI, Asus etc. the quality of their premium products should be about the same (in terms of manufacturing standards anyway, we've all seen duff products that shouldn't have been marketed!).

 

I'm running the latest 1053 on a Deluxe and it's great. In fact, anything since 09xx has been very good.

MSI is seeing the same positive development with more recent BIOS' too, but I had to send that board back. Only Gigabyte has avoided major issues because it isn't perusing UEFI, which is a shame :/ Even so I needed a few updates initially to get the most out of OCing of its P67A but it's good now. However the H67A-UD2H board with F6 is still showing the wrong temps apparently my CPU is running cooler than ambient!?

WRG to RMA rates - a French site recently posted the numbers from their largest retailer and all the top 3 manuf. were under 3% (in fact, within 0.6% of each other iirc).

 

That's an interesting figure, and seems very high - imagine if 3% of nikon cameras were DoA, or the same figure for a major PC vendor. Would have thought that it would have been a lot lower, when you consider the volumes involved? Or, is reflecting the rubbish BIOS shipped day 1, when in reality there's little wrong with the actual h/w itself?

 

I have a P8-P67 PRO board, built my new system at the weekend. Only minor problem I had was when I updated the bios and overclocked the CPU. Booting from a cold start, it would double boot. The fans would start then it would switch off and boot again fine and searching around there were quite a few people with this issue. Also my RAM was auto detected at 1333 instead of 1600.

Resetting the CMOS and setting the RAM to use XMP stopped this and I suppose it was an annoyance more than anything. Can't really fault it otherwise, it's excellent

 

My P5K-Premium does this.

Every time I unplug it from the mains, then plug it back in in the morning, it double boots.

 

@Cerberus90 Annoying isn't it? Maybe you could try what I did if you haven't already

 

If you can direct us to a manufacturer that does not make a single product that may or many not have issues at any point in time, I'm sure we would all like to know.

 

The discussion moved on from the OP...

 

My p8p67 and P5k does it

 

It was (obvious) sarcasm directed at the hysterical nature of your post.