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.
So my experience with ASUS is that they do do this, but they do all of it. To be clear, in the video they explain that once they rejected the outrageous charge for minor cosmetic damage they did get both the reported in-warranty fix and the unreported SD card reader damage fixed. The issue here is ASUS including language that suggests you will forfeit the warranty fix if you don’t accept the extra charges and attempting to charge you for superfluous fixes.
The last time I had to send something to ASUS for a fix they insisted on very detailed up-front images and they did send a bunch of confusing emails like these, but they also did fix the issues after I just chose to ignore the incongruous automated email responses.
Which is not to say I’m defending the practice. When I later had some RAM compatibility issues I chose to ping the RAM manufacturer first instead of ASUS because I knew ASUS’ processes would be more of a pain, which is 100% the intended outcome.