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Products designed to fail, a documentary
Carol Haynes:
Been my experience with ASROCK boards too - run for years without issue. I was under the impression that ASROCK was a budget part of ASUS - if that is true then ASROCK boards seem, in my experience, to last longer than ASUS boards.
My preferred manufacturer now is Gigabyte having had a series of very expensive ASUS boards fail within the 3 year warranty and ASUS unable to produce a replacement and only received a partial refund even though the boards still had nearly a year of warranty to run. I also built office systems from ASUS Barebones boxes for a while and for one build got three DOA boxes - quality control at ASUS has really dropped off.
Strangely I have never seen USB ports fail on a motherboard until this year and so far this year I have seen 4 computer with BEEP CODE errors from faulty USB ports.
Ehtyar:
+1 Gigabyte. I've no experience with ASROCK personally, though my last employer used ASROCK in the white boxes they built before switching to dell, and many of the more recent white boxes often outlasted the Dells (though that's not saying much).
Ehtyar.
daddydave:
Some of the I have found some details and facts about what I referred to above regarding capacitors failing in computers:
* The Great Capacitor Scam
* Capacitor plague
These two do not quite tell the same story, but what becomes apparent or can be supposed is that:
* One or more Taiwanese companies which were large-scale producers of electrolytic capacitors deliberately engaged in a practice of producing those capacitors using an incorrect electrolyte formula, which, under normal operation, slowly caused the production of hydrogen gas, leading to bulging/deformation of the capacitor's case, and eventual cracking or sometimes explosion of the case, releasing the electrolyte either slowly over a period of time, or all at once, respectively.
* It may be that the reason for the manufacture of faulty electrolytic capacitors was industrial espionage "gone wrong": several Taiwanese electrolyte manufacturers began using a stolen formula that was incomplete, and lacked ingredients needed to produce a stable capacitor.
* This seemed to affect all (most?) PC manufacturers' motherboards except where the motherboards were made in Japan - in the latter case, the Japanese manufacturers always adhered to the use of the correct correct electrolyte formula.
* The Taiwanese motherboards would typically fail after about 3 years.
* It wasn't just computer motherboards that were affected, but other electrical equipment too.
* By inference, it could be that Japanese-made electrical equipment may be manufactured without this manufacturing defect.
* Somebody (i.e., the consumer) has ultimately effectively been ripped off.
* It is unclear whether, or to what extent this practice still prevails. Certainly the computer manufacturers are not likely to admit to it, and can avoid fault/liability by blaming their Taiwanese parts manufacturers. -IainB (November 11, 2011, 12:27 AM)
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I just want to chime in that the last Asus motherboard I bought had a blurb stating it used Japanese capacitors, for this reason. It sounds like Asus may have corrected the problem (by finding a different source), although I too have had good experience with ASRock, although it doesn't mean much because I've only bought a couple of their boards.
mahesh2k:
Asrock US based company but taiwani manufactured motherboards, fails in 1 year. I found CMOS battery ending after every 6 months on this board also USB ports die in 1-2 years.-mahesh2k (November 11, 2011, 01:09 AM)
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Well, that's a complete 180 degrees from what I've found. I have two AsRock motherboards that haven't given any problem since new, that's 3+ years - a friend has another with the same story.After Gigabyte, they'd be my next choice depending on features/price required.
-4wd (November 11, 2011, 01:38 AM)
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I understand that many of their pieces are of much higher quality. I don't know how i got faulty products consistently. I guess this has something to do with regular power cuts and other grid issues. But gigabyte and intel boards so far managed to stand even after power related issues.
IainB:
Interesting and relevant post from ARS: Wasteful and unethical: why we hate crippled products
SpoilerWasteful and unethical: why we hate crippled products
By John Timmer | Published February 14, 2012 5:06 PM
In the world of consumer electronics, it's common for companies to create a range of products that are all variations on a theme, containing slightly faster processors or a bit more memory. These products serve two important functions for their producers: they put the price of entry within reach of more consumers, and they induce those with a bit more cash to take steps up the product ladder and purchase a more expensive version. However, a study that has just been released by the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the companies that take this tack have to be careful about how they go about things. Creating a product range by crippling an existing product can work against the company if word filters out.
The study was motivated in part because of a classic example that backfired. IBM once produced a pair of laser printers that differed solely in terms of their rate of output. The lower page-per-minute version, however, actually required that IBM install a specialized chip that throttled the normal printer's output—it took more work to produce, and cost more to make. That approach did not go over well with purchasers, and the authors are able to cite a history of similar products that resulted in a distinctive (and derogatory) vocabulary: "crippleware," "product sabotage," "anti-features," "defective by design," and "damaged goods."
Nevertheless, there are clearly products on the market—Apple's various i-products, to give a prominent example—that sell well despite the same sort of product differentiation. What explains the difference? The authors hypothesized that it comes down to a matter of perception. Consumers are willing to accept this sort of tiered pricing if they feel it's fair, but tend to frown on it if they feel the method of producing the difference was unethical or unfair. The study they conducted indicated they were right, but that the perception of what's ethical could be influenced in some unexpected ways.
To start with, they simply confirmed the effect by describing a new instance of IBM's approach to crippling a product to a study population, while creating a control group that was told the higher output printer was the one that required more effort to make. People generally felt that paying for an enhancement was reasonable, but responded poorly when it took effort to reduce a product's capabilities, rating that process as not only unfair, but unethical. In fact, they found it so bothersome that they preferred a competitor's product.
Through a series of experiments, however, the authors found a number of ways that companies could reduce (though not eliminate) the negative perceptions of their action. For example, the "everybody's doing it" excuse worked; when people were told that most manufacturers crippled features of low-end phones via software, the study's participants were more tolerant of the practice. Keeping the high- and low-end products distinct, even if it was purely through a cosmetic feature (case color on an MP3 player), also cut down on the sense of dissatisfaction.
It was also clear that people cared a great deal about how the difference came about. For example, simply cutting an internal connection to cripple the low-end product was worse than removing the hardware that supported the feature entirely. The timing of the disabling also mattered. The study's participants were more tolerant of a DVD player that had a high-quality video chip disabled early in the manufacturing process than they were when the chip was disabled as the last step.
In addition to providing some sense of the subtleties of consumer thinking, these studies helped eliminate an alternative explanation for the negative response: consumers don't like waste. It's more wasteful, for example, to remove and destroy a component than it is to leave it in place and cut the connection. Yet the latter approach bothered the study's participants much more.
It's easy to think that little details like this would never make their way into a consumer's brain, and thus are irrelevant to product marketing. But the sudden attention paid to the conditions at places like Foxconn (which manufactures products for Apple and other consumer electronics companies) suggest that companies can't take this for granted. The authors also point out that social media has the potential to take obscure details and turn them into widespread public outrage.
All of which suggests that companies should probably expect that their approach to creating a product range might eventually become the subject of online discussion. And, if they have chosen a process that violates some of the principles laid out by the experiments above, they might end up facing a consumer backlash.
Journal of Consumer Research, 2012. DOI: Not yet available.
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