Came up with no problems and bios interface is impressive. Documentation is a bit more polished that Gigabytes which is one of the reasons I chose it. I find the theatrical lighting a bit silly but you can turn some of it off. When I saw it for $40 less on Newegg, I complained and Amazon refunded the difference.
I have now had the board for 13 months. About two months ago it stopped knowing which drive to boot from. Also the list of drives from which to select the automatic boot no longer listed all the drives. I called Asus and the tech told me I have to clear the cmos by removing the battery. I was not comfortable with doing that because I did not want to risk causing more problems and could get around it by hitting F8 and manually selecting the boot drive. Last night while doing a backup, the board stopped seeing the the C drive altogether and would not boot at all. By just leaving the system powered off for about an hour. it suddenly did see the drive and I was able to manually select the drive and boot. I figured it was time to have the whole issue taken care of and I called Asus tech support. The tech told me to update to the latest bios version. We went through the whole procedure with no apparent problems. When I tried to reboot - nothing - zilch - nada, nothing on the screen. The tech then told me to remove the battery for 30 sec, reinsert it and reboot. Still nothing. I called back and they then told me to try this again but to leave the battery out for 10 minutes. I did - and still nothing. So now I have removed the board and sent it to them for "repair", and will have to wait for what they say will be three weeks. Since I need a system for my work, I ordered an identical new board figuring it wouldn't hurt to have a spare. After ordering it from Amazon, just out of curiosity I checked the price on Newegg and saw it for 149.99 instead of 161. This time Amazon refused to match the price so I cancelled the Amazon order and ordered it from NewEgg. I then got to thinking that with the 5% Amazon credit card and the Newegg shipping (which was only $3). The price would end up with only a couple of dollars difference, and since I buy a lot from Amazon, I figured I would stick with Amazon and went to reinstate the Amazon order. Whoops! the Amazon price had jumped to $166 and no, they would not honor the $161 price from 15 minutes ago. So I let the Newegg order stand. (The guy did tell me how terribly sad he was about it, but I told him that I was really not very interested in his emotional state.) Now about 45 minutes later, while browsing through computer components I noticed that - would you believe it? the price had jumped again now to $170.30. There is something very fishy going on here, I am beginning to wonder if Amazon is factoring in people's browsing habits to influence the prices that they see. I am going to do some experimenting by having different people look up the same item and compare prices. I will report on the results (if Amazon will print it.) Asus has a good reputation, I have had many of their boards over the years but I have now seen a bunch of reports of their boards dying after a few months. (See Newegg reviews of this board.) I am eager to see if at least one the Asus boards I get will stay happy.
UPDATE 8/17/20017 - As noted above I ended up getting the board from Newegg because of the $35 rebate. Beware of the rebate, it's not what it seems. It took me three months of calls and emails to get. When it finally came, it was in the form of a prepaid Visa card that has to be "activated". It is essentially impossible to use the card to defray the cost of an online purchase because no online vendor will accept a payment split between two sources. So your order has to be for the exact amount on the card (or less of you will accept a lowered "rebate"). The only place I know of that easily accepts split payments are restaurants - so if you don't often go to restaurants, you're out of luck. The card came with lots of ads for me to open accounts at places that sell what I never want. In summary the rebate is designed to be a big hassle and in my view, not worth the trouble. Also, Asus wil not honor an exchange on a board for which they given a rebate so be sure the board you have is working because you will not be able to exchange it. I sent this review to Newegg, but they did not print it. So much for the integrity of their reviews..
| Memory Speed | 2133 MHz |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
