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Redditor finds heavy block of iron shavings inside cheap PSU, also appears to lack safety protections
(www.tomshardware.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I haven't had any problem with their boards either, but that's a sample size of less than half-a-dozen, strictly AMD-based mobos. Really not definitive, and I believe the people who say they've gotten multiple bad Asus boards.
In the end, it's down to luck. Every manufacturer sends out some percentage of products that have undetected faults or are damaged in shipping. What that percentage is depends on QA and product design. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Asus had some boards with design issues that led to high failure rates, while others are solid.
My sample size is 1. And it sits under my desk since 2018 along with a "be quiet!" PSU inside a Fractal R6 and doesn't give any indications of giving up soon. Only issue I had in all that time was that I couldn't OC the RAM which I gave up on since the rig was fast enough for anything I wanna do.
OTOH a friend of mine was complaining about his Asus notebook a lot recently. The keyboard illumination wouldn't work anymore from one day to the next (he blamed a windows update), a speaker was snarring and the fans were on constantly.
My sample size is three, with the current one being an X399-A first-gen Threadripper board bought on Black Friday of 2017. The only issue I've had that could be attributed specifically to that motherboard was lack of Linux kernel support for the onboard it-87 sensor chip variant at the time I bought it.
Your friend's notebook sound like everything except the mobo is breaking on him. 😜