That's the case with every single Asus thing sadly. OLED monitors? Yep, there are others cheaper. Video cards? You know it. Sound cards? Motherboards? They do some great stuff, but they aint double better. That's why the last Asus thing i got was in 2008. If they wanna act like Apple = skippppppp
I completely agree and you know it's not like their products are bad, far from it. My craptop is actually an ASUS and I bought it because it was actually the best deal at the time. I got a backlit keyboard and a GTX 1050M for the same price as other craptops that didn't have those features. They were otherwise identical.
It's the same attitude that I have towards GeForce cards. I'll never say that they're not great products (because of course that are), it's just that, at the same price point, a Radeon is almost always faster and usually has more VRAM.
I've been building PCs since 1988 (yeah, I'm old..lol) and the most important thing that I've learnt over the years is to never be a brand-wh0re. This is because, no matter what the brand is, the product was made by companies with years of experience that have employed real professionals. The only brand I refuse to buy is MSi but that's not because I think their stuff is bad, it's because they treated me badly when one of their flagship motherboards died on me (the only motherboard that has ever died on me).
Yeah, just look at the flagship AM5 motherboards, more than 4x what I paid for my X370 board (Which was ASUS) and that oled monitor is comical, 20% premium for less features than some models with the same panel. After the warranty debacle they had a little while back they need to wind their necks in a bit.
I agree completely. That's why my two AM4 boards have been ASRock. It's funny because ASRock boards tend to offer the best value of "The Big Four" (ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte & MSi) yet ASRock began as ASUS' OEM division.
Like you, I also tend to buy X-series boards because I like the extra PCIe and M.2 slots. My first AM4 board was an ASRock X370 Killer SLI and it was fantastic. I replaced it with an ASRock X570 Pro4 because I wanted to try Smart Access Memory. I should've stuck with the X370 because SAM wasn't worth it at the time.
If I were to choose an AM5 motherboard today, it would definitely be the ASRock X670E PG Lightning. It's a full-featured X670E board for less than the others want for normal X670 boards. Steve Walton said it's a great value and recommends it.
You really can't infer much from brands' individual series names.
By far the worst 30-series RTX cards I encountered were Asus Dual models - 3060 and 3060Ti, yet their "Dual" 3070 was fine, and their Dual 4070 is so good it makes more expensive variants like the TUF and Strix almost pointless.
Given there are about 20 completely different variants of the "Asus Dual" cooler strapped to around 85 different RTX SKUs, it's pretty clear that the model name "dual" is meaningless. Some have been reviewed as garbage-tier coolers with a shortage of heatpipes and cheap extruded alu heatsinks, whilst others are high-end coolers with premium construction, overkill fin stacks and a surplus of cooling. I'm only even looking at Asus' RTX product stack, they make Radeon "Dual" cards too, and their design sometimes bears little resemblance to the Geforce of similar TDP which makes no sense at all because the TDP determines the quality of the VRM and cooler which is 90% of what makes a premium card premium and an entry-level card, entry-level.
My general opinion is that most Asus cards are overpriced but there are enough individual SKUs that buck the trend and are highly competitive to not dismiss Asus as an overpriced brand as a rule.
TL; DR
The quality of a specific sub-brand within a manufacturer's range is meaningless, which means trying to paint a whole manufacturer with the same brush is impossible. You need to looks for reviews of the exact, individual GPU in question. Even a V2 suffix is enough to make it a completely different product.
Thank <deity of choice> for independent journalism and their impartial reviews!
I completely agree. I don't care what brand something is. I have a saying that noobs look at brand while experts just look at spec.
Some ASUS stuff is pretty good value (my craptop is proof of that) and most ASUS products are of very good quality. However, I don't think that their motherboards or video cards are superior to ASRock, Gigabyte or MSi. I also don't think that their video cards are better-made than brands like Powercolor, Sapphire, XFX or Yeston. In fact, I would trust those four brand more than ASUS because video cards are their core competencies while ASUS makes so many other things.
