"jime" said:
I am considering buying a ASUS MoBo. One of my considerations is the
quality of the support (or lack of) given by the company. How is the support
by ASUS?
Consider the magnitude of the problem. The last time I looked at
the Asus info page, it said they have 5000 employees, and most
of those will be manufacturing boards every day. They ship
2,000,000 boards a month. From that ratio, I think you can see
it would be pretty difficult to help 2 million people every month.
(Your vendor could help you, but then it would be best to buy
local, so you can drag the machine in for them to examine.)
If you visit the contact page for Asus, there are long distance
numbers (not toll free!). You can phone to talk to a tech support
person, and some people have had great help from these people
(tech stays on the line for an hour or more, to try to help them).
If the support devolves to email exchange, then you will tend to
get boiler-plate responses (every email starts with "reinstall
the OS" etc).
There is the user manual, the FAQ web page (poor and spotty info
- Asus are more honest over the phone than on a webpage and will
admit to more of their problems and screwups by phone), the private
forums (abxzone.com, amdmb.com, nforcershq.com and many more), and
this news group. Expect to get most of your help from the end users,
no matter what the brand. Maybe Supermicro would give you a better
support experience than the others, but then you are paying a small
fortune for a server motherboard.
We do this stuff for fun. If I didn't have time for this, I can
purchase the product I want at a local shop, and they will assemble
my custom order and test it, for little more than the cost of the
parts. They take care of the dud gear. In terms of just getting a
computer in your hands, it is frequently cheaper to buy a
"beige box" at your local department store - but you'll likely
get an SIS chipset
HTH,
Paul