Blogs RIP: Asus responds to its flaming motherboard

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2009/03/18/rip-asus-responds-to-flaming-motherboard/

 

Awesome. DSO's really are too cool for school.

 

They're going through a lot of effort for you, they must think highly of your opinions. Now get them to sort their support site and download servers!

 

Seconded, site and downloads are atrocious from ASUS

 

Third-ed.
Great hardware, but horrible support.
New Xonar D1 Firmware please!

It's quite interesting to see the kind of checks they're doing on the board.
For most enthusiasts, once you see a part of the board melted or burnt-out, the initial reaction is to treat the whole board as being fried.

For someone who knows their electronics that'd seem kinda silly, but seeing ASUS describe the result as :

- Changes that perception of the board a little from the point of view of a layman-enthusiast.
Makes me wish I had the tools and know-how to test and repair components like this myself instead of going through RMAs.

 

The problem with this whole scenario is $$.
Let's take a hypothetical tour
The board comes back to the manufacturer for RMA.
Without the association of Bit-Tech name you just throw it in a recycle pile.
BUT this one is high visiblity so we send it to "the lab".
Now these are not minimum wage individuals - these are highly schooled and trained people with a bazillion $ worth of state of the art equipment.

One 8 hour day for this engineer is probably in the $50 to $100 per hour so you have $400 to $800 invested in one day testing this board by the engineer. That assumes only one engineer. In my experience it is seldom 1 engineer doing the testing.

It is so difficult to spend the $$ to test that it is no longer economically feasible for a manu. to test hardly any of the RMAs.

In a perfect world a chain of RMAs for a device with the same defect should alert the people that they have a problem with component XX. But it seldom happens.

I don't know what the internal cost of this board was to Asus but it was probably less than a good evening meal out.

One can only hope that by this exercise Asus will improve either the component or the design.

It's sad to see so many $$ parts scrapped out because of one 4 cent part.

I do hardware and software for a living and have for 30 years.
Pulling a card and replacing it is cheaper than fixing.

john

 

I suppose the level of service would depend on whether the tech people are really concerned about it - if it was just a silly bugger of a pre-release board, I could understand them not making a big deal, but once something actually goes up in flames it certainly warrants investigation.

I would bet that most RMA's don't involve fire, only a defective flash or similar.

 

Lovely fingernails for an engineer.