Asus tech support fails to make the grade

THE IT INDUSTRY HAS to grow up. It does not matter if you're a maker of a computer game or a hardware product, a level of support has to be achieved in order for a customer to develop confidence in a brand he owns.

Colleagues from Benchzone took on the task of trying to evaluate what kind of experience users are usually getting, not shielded with a marketing/PR umbrella that we hacks are privvy to. First company in the line was Asustek Computer Inc, but customer experience was disappointing. It's one thing to manufacture a product, another thing to support it.

To make things a bit worse, hardcore enthusiasts from VR-Zone reviewed the Asus P5B DeLuxe motherboard, but to make things more interesting, they compared the P5B against never-released GigaByte GA-975X-DS5. Since Asus and Gigabyte now have a joint venture company named GigaByte United, this product will not come to life at all, but it's still funny to see GigaByte's motherboard kicking P5B in CrossFire mode.

Jarred from AnandTech walked into a barn and picked up gaming machine with factory overclocked quad-core Kentsfield CPU, but Gateway FX530 (name sounds like Athlon 64 FX-53 based machine) failed to generate more than couple of "moos" due to company's decision to use cheaper DDR2-667 memory. ATi Radeon X1950 in CrossFire mode was an interesting choice, but reviewer failed to see that Gateway only wanted to make its system fully compliant with Windows Vista, and two GeForce 8800GTXs will not grant that request until late April.

Departing Will Harris from Bit-Tech got himself lost in Las Vegas Convention Centre (not a hard thing to do) and found Cooler Master's new Media case which will fit a GeForce 8800GTX and still have better airflow than many classical cases out there.

Motherboards.Org decided to find an ideal case for their needs, so they opted for Swiftec Quite Power P180. To see how a motherboard reviews a case, click here. If you're a motherboard which wants to try some sports activities like overclocking, you might consider this case, but if you want some hard-core sports activities which include overvolting your four heads, it might be a good idea to look further.

PCStats dug into the world of removable storage and tested Icy Dock MB452, an e-SATA based housing for a SATA drive. Besides removable storage, Max Page tested EPoX EP-AF550G, an nForce 6100-based motherboard for AMD's Socket AM2 processors. At requested price, board is a steal.

RBmods took a 512MB MPEG-4/MP3/DVR player for a spin. Before you shot down the idea of owning a player with only 512Mb of storage, yours truly have to say that idea is appealing, since you have a choice of expanding it with memory cards of regular speed or something more decent, like SanDisk's Ultra series. Having some spare memory for your digital camera can come quite handy.

Guru3D took a look into HIS Radeon X1950Pro ICEQ3 Edition, which is based on a good ATI RV570 GPU. However, with mainstream DirectX 10 boards coming your way in a matter of few weeks, it might be a good time to consider waiting just a bit more.

And for the end of today's roundup, we are giving you a l'inq to a video which will show you how to install a Windows Vista Home Premium "operating system" on appropriate system in a matter of minutes. The author claims two minutes, but that really depends on the speed of your system. µ

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