This undercover warranty investigation is a one-year follow-up from our series that investigated ASUS for motherboards incinerating AMD CPUs, at the end of which ASUS promised a number of improvements to its then-anti-consumer warranty processes. Spoiler alert: They’re still anti-consumer. We sent our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme in for warranty repair for issues with the left joystick (“drift”). The device also had a broken microSD card. ASUS then pointed to the world’s tiniest scratch and tried to charge us $200 for it under threat of sending back a disassembled device if we didn’t pay within 5 days. It felt like extortion. If you’re wondering whether ASUS is worth buying, the answer for anyone who values support should be “no.”
We have now tested ASUS’ motherboard and ROG Ally warranty and RMA processes. Both have been anti-consumer experiences.
I’ve had good experience with EVGA both times I’ve had problems with their hardware, this year most recently. MSI is supposedly OK too, but I never had to deal with their warranty.
Heard good about EVGA and Sapphire too. However my personal experience with MSI(laptops) have not been great. But shame about Asus as they so much more than EVGA and Sapphire as they only make Graphic Cards AFAIK.