Asus updates warranty policy for AM5 motherboards after Ryzen burnout fiasco

[nanoguy]

In context: Some unfortunate AMD Ryzen 7000X3D CPU owners have had to deal with unexpected processor and motherboard failures while using heavily-advertised memory overclocking features like AMD EXPO on high-end AM5 motherboards. Asus was quick to respond to the issue, but it did so in a way that caused confusion for affected users and prompted a mountain of criticism from independent media. Now the company is taking the first step in repairing its reputation with better warranty coverage for AM5 motherboards.

Last month, several people using Ryzen 7000X3D processors in their systems reported their CPUs were burning out for no apparent reason. The problem turned out to be related to poorly-tested BIOS releases that companies like MSI and Asus released as "stable" versions even though they were causing AM5 processors to operate at unsafe voltages.

Following a thorough investigation by Gamers Nexus that criticized Asus for the way it handled the whole situation, some high-profile YouTube channels announced they were pausing their Asus sponsorships. On one hand, the Taiwanese company was quick to react to reports of burning Ryzen CPUs with BIOS revisions. On the other hand, the new versions were not meant for public use and the release notes didn't clearly mention they would void your warranty.

This meant that many users could upgrade to a newer BIOS and still face the risk of their CPUs and motherboards failing. Meanwhile, the company kept recommending that users avoid using heavily-advertised features like AMD EXPO on its AM5 motherboards as doing so would void their warranty.

The good news is that Asus seems to have bowed to public pressure after realizing the mixed messaging around overheating Ryzen CPUs on its high-end motherboards and BIOS revisions was damaging the brand. The company has issued a statement that promises all affected users will get motherboard coverage, including those of you who use beta BIOS releases or memory overclocking features like AMD EXPO/DOCP and Intel XMP.

Also read: Guide to AMD Ryzen 7000 Motherboard Chipsets

Asus has listed support phone numbers for customers in the US, EU, UK, and Australia who need help with their AM5 motherboard troubles. The company also notes that it has removed BIOS updates that don't follow AMD's latest voltage guidelines for AMD's Ryzen 7000 series processors.

Overall, this is a big win for consumers, some of whom paid for expensive X670 motherboards thinking they would get the best that the AM5 platform has to offer. At the same time, Asus could have avoided the public backlash with better messaging, and we're hoping the company will deliver on its promise of "supporting the AMD AM5 platform and our customers."

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98705-asus-updates-warranty-policy-am5-motherboards-after-ryzen.html

 

[yRaz]

I'm glad Asus ended up doing the right thing. I've never thought of them as a "scummy" company but this absolutely could have been avoided on so many levels. After a well deserved roast from the tech community they retracted on their warranty and came out with what I'm calling "non-loss" not a win, for consumers.

 

[DSirius]

I have and use Asus products, but after all of this, my trust in Asus in Zero.
If Asus really wants customers to trust them again, better start firing all who decided to not cover warranty in the first place, starting with execs and CEO. Only after that I may take them into consideration.

I noticed for more than 3 years ago that the quality of their products started to decline. I bought their Asus Crosshair many generation. Every year the quality declined and their prices went up.

The worst product I got from them was Asus GeForce® RTX™ 2070 Super OC EVO. Plastic and cheap materials, but high price. I buough it right at the beginning of the crypto mining scalpers era.

No more Asus for me. The competition is very good, I have many others MB and videocard AIB to choose.

 

[Achaios]

Tech Jesus ftw.

I have been very happy with ASUS motherboards as my 190€ Maximus VI Hero motherboard from distant 2013 is still working perfectly well and supporting my overclocked 4770K.

That's ten long years of working every day with a maxed out OC CPU. This should say something about the quality of early ASUS motherboards.

Now imagine, back in 2013 you could buy current gen Maximus series MOBO for under 200€ whereas now you need abt 1k€ to do so.

It is obvious that ASUS have lost their way and I also detect lots of hybris and pride there by the bucketload.

 

[waclark]

I have and use Asus products, but after all of this, my trust in Asus in Zero.
If Asus really wants customers to trust them again, better start firing all who decided to not cover warranty in the first place, starting with execs and CEO. Only after that I may take them into consideration.

I noticed for more than 3 years ago that the quality of their products started to decline. I bought their Asus Crosshair many generation. Every year the quality declined and their prices went up.

The worst product I got from them was Asus GeForce® RTX™ 2070 Super OC EVO. Plastic and cheap materials, but high price. I buough it right at the beginning of the crypto mining scalpers era.

No more Asus for me. The competition is very good, I have many others MB and videocard AIB to choose.

I suspect that this originated in the legal department of Asus. Legal people look at company liability and they want to minimize it in the extreme. It's par for the course. How many times have you heard those disclaimers at the end of a TV commercial, spoken really quickly, that warns if you take xyz medication it can result in a laundry-list of bad reactions including death? It's what lawyers do. Often times executives don't even know everything the lawyers are throwing into the warranties. It sounds like someone at Asus figured out that the communications were pissing people off and they have clarified it so that people who are affected now know that they are covered. I don't think you can ask for much more than that.

Companies like Gamer Nexus don't really understand the difference in a 100-person company and a 5000-person company that is global. What seems simple and trivial is very often not for large corporations. I think Asus did the right thing and they did it quickly, so kudos to them. Will I buy an Asus mobo with an AMD CPU anytime soon? Maybe, though I will say this situation has given me reason to pause on both Asus and AMD.

 

[DSirius]

I suspect that this originated in the legal department of Asus. Legal people look at company liability and they want to minimize it in the extreme. It's par for the course. How many times have you heard those disclaimers at the end of a TV commercial, spoken really quickly, that warns if you take xyz medication it can result in a laundry-list of bad reactions including death? It's what lawyers do. Often times executives don't even know everything the lawyers are throwing into the warranties. It sounds like someone at Asus figured out that the communications were pissing people off and they have clarified it so that people who are affected now know that they are covered. I don't think you can ask for much more than that.

Companies like Gamer Nexus don't really understand the difference in a 100-person company and a 5000-person company that is global. What seems simple and trivial is very often not for large corporations. I think Asus did the right thing and they did it quickly, so kudos to them. Will I buy an Asus mobo with an AMD CPU anytime soon? Maybe, though I will say this situation has given me reason to pause on both Asus and AMD.

Intel is involved too, they do not offer warranty too, so let's not make this only AMD-Asus. It is Intel-Asus too.
In fact Intel, AMD and MB AIB's are in the same bed with all Memory manufacturers. They offered their products XMP certified for years, nowadays EXPO certified too. Customers bought expensive certified memories, XMP or EXPO, and now they say, well our warranty was shady, to be clear we do not offer warranty at all.
How dumb is this?
Asus was the dumbest from them, for being the first so anti-consumer.

BTW, Intel 13900K managed to be only 5% slower than 7950X3D or 7800X3D due to 7200Mhz XMP memory help, otherwise is up to 15% slower. Without XMP, nowadays Intel would have sell their processors much cheaper. The same for AMD with EXPO.

 

[brucek]

Companies like Gamer Nexus don't really understand the difference in a 100-person company and a 5000-person company that is global.

While I agree that helps explain how this could happen, I think GN was 100% right to call them out on it. Prior to GN's spotlight the situation was "You have a defective product that can ignite itself and your CPU, so our recommendation is to install this BIOS that may help but will also immediately void your warranty, and also we recommend you turn off the EXPO feature without which our product and the CPU that goes in it make absolutely no sense on a price/performance basis." This is a completely untenable position and leaving consumers stuck with the bag of excrement was the wrong approach.

Intel is involved too, they do not offer warranty too, so let's not make this only AMD-Asus.

The comparison to Intel's XMP only goes so far. Yes, there's similar fine print somewhere at the bottom of a legal document. But there aren't systems blowing up from turning it on, there aren't major manufacturers telling you to turn it off, and Intel's reputation is that they generally will not void a warranty over it's use even if they have the same fine print in their warranty (I believe GN actually tested that a while back.)

 

[McMurdeR]

This is a completely untenable position and leaving consumers stuck with the bag of excrement was the wrong approach.

Hear hear. The community was already showing frustration with the direction vendors are going with next gen motherboard products, there wasn't a whole lot of goodwill going around from the outset.

Looking under the hood at some of these UEFIs it's become increasingly clear that Asus in particular has shown a remarkably casual attitude towards voltage configurations used to enable EXPO. Moreover it still isn't clear if they've fully resolved the issue, and information hasn't exactly been forthcoming. They've said and done very little to alleviate the impression that this might be a competence issue. As well as reaffirming their commitment to warrenty on all published UEFIs, including betas, I would like to see Asus publish a detailed report on the cause and consequences of these failures. It would go a long way to restoring faith in the brand.

 

[Gastec]

Tech Jesus ftw.

I have been very happy with ASUS motherboards as my 190€ Maximus VI Hero motherboard from distant 2013 is still working perfectly well and supporting my overclocked 4770K.

That's ten long years of working every day with a maxed out OC CPU. This should say something about the quality of early ASUS motherboards.

Now imagine, back in 2013 you could buy current gen Maximus series MOBO for under 200€ whereas now you need abt 1k€ to do so.

It is obvious that ASUS have lost their way and I also detect lots of hybris and pride there by the bucketload.

Ten years later, the equivalent motherboard Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero has a MSRP of $629 or 659€ ($715) in Europe.

 

[DSirius]

The comparison to Intel's XMP only goes so far. Yes, there's similar fine print somewhere at the bottom of a legal document. But there aren't systems blowing up from turning it on, there aren't major manufacturers telling you to turn it off, and Intel's reputation is that they generally will not void a warranty over it's use even if they have the same fine print in their warranty (I believe GN actually tested that a while back.)

The real issue here is that both Intel and AMD lied and Intel lied first and for more years than AMD. The fact that now things blown up, only exposed their lies. Watch Der8er video.
And Intel made customers accountable, and you can acknowledge this by the fact that Intel support asked customers what memory they used. Informed customers had to lie to benefit from the warranty, instead of being mandatory from the start.
So Intel, AMD and MB AIBs, lied customers about warranty, while promoting XMP and EXPO, and they hid this in shady subnotes. What I want to point out is that all of them are accountable for those lies and shenanigans about warranty.
I think that a class action lawsuit will clear all this mess faster or at least will uncover the truth and force all those company to be accountable for their lies and stop these kind of shenanigans.
Kudos for the reviewers and YouTubers who took a stand and exposed them all.

P.S. Finally Asus released today the "official" Bios covered by warranty, so I can update my MB. The last from ASUS as I said.

 

[Gastec]

Asus customer: Your product is defective, it caused damage to my goods and property.
Asus customer support: Stop using the product. Now get lost, I'm busy posting tweets!

 

[kiwigraeme]

Thing is so few MB companies - I'm now happy to wait before my next major upgrade
Gigabyte isn't perfect - but they seem to fumble along .
Seen complaints against them all - MSI isn't what it used to be from - I hear
I suppose make one genius Carbon MB and people expect next one to be as good

Just wait a year - I say - new CPUs on sale - MB version 1.2 plus better bios and memory compatibility well known and just works
Especially as not cheap and a pain to remove and replace

Unless you are rocking an Intel core duo and want a big update - just wait

Plus wonder how much of this is Engineers VS bean Counters - even NASA F.U a few times

 

[Gastec]

Thing is so few MB companies - I'm now happy to wait before my next major upgrade
Gigabyte isn't perfect - but they seem to fumble along .
Seen complaints against them all - MSI isn't what it used to be from - I hear
I suppose make one genius Carbon MB and people expect next one to be as good

Just wait a year - I say - new CPUs on sale - MB version 1.2 plus better bios and memory compatibility well known and just works
Especially as not cheap and a pain to remove and replace

Unless you are rocking an Intel core duo and want a big update - just wait

Plus wonder how much of this is Engineers VS bean Counters - even NASA F.U a few times

It's not so much an issue with the build quality of the motherboards but an issue with the overclocking they did. This was an accident waiting to happen. First they did the shenanigans with the MCE activated by default now this.

 

[Watzupken]

I suspect that this originated in the legal department of Asus. Legal people look at company liability and they want to minimize it in the extreme. It's par for the course. How many times have you heard those disclaimers at the end of a TV commercial, spoken really quickly, that warns if you take xyz medication it can result in a laundry-list of bad reactions including death? It's what lawyers do. Often times executives don't even know everything the lawyers are throwing into the warranties. It sounds like someone at Asus figured out that the communications were pissing people off and they have clarified it so that people who are affected now know that they are covered. I don't think you can ask for much more than that.

Companies like Gamer Nexus don't really understand the difference in a 100-person company and a 5000-person company that is global. What seems simple and trivial is very often not for large corporations. I think Asus did the right thing and they did it quickly, so kudos to them. Will I buy an Asus mobo with an AMD CPU anytime soon? Maybe, though I will say this situation has given me reason to pause on both Asus and AMD.

Whether it's the legal team or not, people see Asus as 1 single entity. If a decision was made by a team, I don't believe management did not agree to it before it is published to the public. What they did obviously have serious repercussions and XMP or EXPO are really not something new.

 

[whateversa]

The question is, would this have been resolved without all the media coverage? That is my problem with this - the little guy stood no chance without media.

 

[James Ryan]

I'm glad Asus ended up doing the right thing. I've never thought of them as a "scummy" company but this absolutely could have been avoided on so many levels. After a well deserved roast from the tech community they retracted on their warranty and came out with what I'm calling "non-loss" not a win, for consumers.

Saving their own asses without pissing off too many shareholders...
Typical for a corp...

 

[KofeViR]

Ten years later, the equivalent motherboard Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero has a MSRP of $629 or 659€ ($715) in Europe.

That motherboard was not 190 dollars MSRP and the comparison makes little sense because Hero back then was not a high-end solution really. Hero was their mid-end line, it has gotten moore beefy since (better VRMs by far) and closer to high-end in their lineup

 

[waclark]

Whether it's the legal team or not, people see Asus as 1 single entity. If a decision was made by a team, I don't believe management did not agree to it before it is published to the public. What they did obviously have serious repercussions and XMP or EXPO are really not something new.

Having worked in the corporate world for many years and some of those years as Product Marketing, I can tell you that "management" is not always in the loop. It really depends. Sure, a mid-level manager was engaged but no one at the "C" level reviewed my work.

I agree that this was a ridiculous response and that saying that using EXPO would void warranties when the company is using those technologies to demonstrate and position the product against competitors is likely not defensible in a court of law. But, how many people are going to sue over a $300 mobo? I suspect that the offending language was mostly "boilerplate" that some lawyer cut and pasted from other documents and it's highly likely that whoever put that together wasn't technically savvy and confused CPU overclocking with EXPO. While EXPO is "overclocking" I don't see it as the same as cranking up your CPU clocks and voltages.

 

[waclark]

While I agree that helps explain how this could happen, I think GN was 100% right to call them out on it. Prior to GN's spotlight the situation was "You have a defective product that can ignite itself and your CPU, so our recommendation is to install this BIOS that may help but will also immediately void your warranty, and also we recommend you turn off the EXPO feature without which our product and the CPU that goes in it make absolutely no sense on a price/performance basis." This is a completely untenable position and leaving consumers stuck with the bag of excrement was the wrong approach.

I agree, it was right to call them out, but sometimes the rhetoric can be a little over the top. I know everyone thinks corporate executives sit around and think about how they can screw their customers all day long, but the reality is they are just people like you and me. That's not to condone the statements made, but it's easy to understand how mistakes like this can be made in large corporations. The bigger the company the more likely that legal people, developers and product marketing people are not in lock-step with each other.

And yeah, it was a bonehead move to claim that using a technology developed by AMD was not covered under AMD warranties. But, as I said, I suspect this was some guy in legal that probably didn't understand what EXPO was in the first place.

 

[waclark]

Intel is involved too, they do not offer warranty too, so let's not make this only AMD-Asus. It is Intel-Asus too.
In fact Intel, AMD and MB AIB's are in the same bed with all Memory manufacturers. They offered their products XMP certified for years, nowadays EXPO certified too. Customers bought expensive certified memories, XMP or EXPO, and now they say, well our warranty was shady, to be clear we do not offer warranty at all.
How dumb is this?
Asus was the dumbest from them, for being the first so anti-consumer.

BTW, Intel 13900K managed to be only 5% slower than 7950X3D or 7800X3D due to 7200Mhz XMP memory help, otherwise is up to 15% slower. Without XMP, nowadays Intel would have sell their processors much cheaper. The same for AMD with EXPO.

A quick check of the Intel web site shows that they have an XMP certification process. I highly doubt they would deny a warranty claim for a certified XMP memory module, assuming you're not operating outside the tested parameters. And maybe AMD would do the same, I didn't go to their site to find out.

As for performance, I assume you're referencing gaming performance because the 13900K pretty much beat the 7950X3D in productivity tasks. Also, I think some of these gaming benchmarks are not always giving you real-world results. What I mean is that if you're buying a 13900 or a 7950, you're likely not gaming in 1080P. So, when you build a system, with a good GPU and a good CPU you're building for a certain resolution and performance. You wouldn't pair a 3050 with a 13900K and expect to get the best performance. Either CPU will perform more than adequately when paired with a higher end GPU.

 

[Gastec]

I agree, it was right to call them out, but sometimes the rhetoric can be a little over the top. I know everyone thinks corporate executives sit around and think about how they can screw their customers all day long, but the reality is they are just people like you and me. That's not to condone the statements made, but it's easy to understand how mistakes like this can be made in large corporations. The bigger the company the more likely that legal people, developers and product marketing people are not in lock-step with each other.

And yeah, it was a bonehead move to claim that using a technology developed by AMD was not covered under AMD warranties. But, as I said, I suspect this was some guy in legal that probably didn't understand what EXPO was in the first place.

I'm going to buy now a motherboard from Asus to show my support to Corporate Commander who is just people (not Soylent Green) like you and him.

 

[waclark]

I'm going to buy now a motherboard from Asus to show my support to Corporate Commander who is just people (not Soylent Green) like you and him.

Great. Just wondering if you've ever worked in a big corporation and have any idea what it's like?

 

[Gastec]

Great. Just wondering if you've ever worked in a big corporation and have any idea what it's like?

I am working right now for a big corporation, in a factory, but I only interact with fellow engineers and technicians. The office suits are a different breed with different customs, interests and lifestyles, they don't look down at plebeians.