The man behind the curtain is turning on the PlanetLab node - Patrick Wizard of Oz Gelsinger
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Asus quietly follows Gigabyte's 2oz copper lead
IT WOULD APPEAR the INQ has uncovered a little bit of hypocrisy from the Asus family when it comes to 2oz copper printed circuit boards (PCBs). 2oz copper PCBs have been a Gigabyte flagship feature since September of last year; an expensive, yet daring move by the firm's CEO to try to innovate its way out of the economic crisis. But not everyone is a fan. Or are they?
A while back, Asus' little sister, Asrock, sent out a plethora of PowerPoint presentations to press, decrying the evils of using so much copper, in such wanton wasteful fashion, saying it would damage the environment and be the eventual downfall of the human race - or something along those lines.
Asrock was so indignant, it even went so far as making a video to prove that its X58 board was far cooler - in both senses of the word - than Gigabyte's 2oz copper offering, and without any of that nasty copper either.
Asrock's video compared the temperature of its motherboards' CPU power phases to Gigabyte's, showing its own as having significantly lower temperatures. What the firm didn't mention in the video, however, was that while Asrock was using a CPU cooler with a large fan to blow cool air down over the CPU VRM, Gigabyte's claim was staked using a fanless water cooler.
An air cooler cools the CPU and all the onboard components around the CPU. Gigabyte had used a fanless water cooling setup in order to show how its 2oz copper PCB helped dissipate heat from the CPU VRM, and the fanless setup showed a bigger temperature difference than when using a CPU cooler with a fan.
Asrock had simply nicked Gigabyte's own results and twisted them to its own nefarious purpose. Realising its customers were getting confused, Gigabyte decided to release another thermal diagram, this time showing the system with a CPU fan, for a somewhat fairer comparison with Asrock's dodgy video.
But as the mudslinging campaign finally settled down, and the last few quarters saw Gigabyte's motherboard market share growing yet again, the Asus family appeared to forget their conscientious objections to environment polluting copper. With no fuss, fanfare, press releases, videos or even a demo at Computex, Asus quietly released three 2oz copper PCB motherboards: the Intel P5P43TD PRO, P5P43TD and AMD M4A77TD PRO.
Remarkably there is no mention of 2oz copper on the official Asus website for any of these models, but INQuiring eyes can see 2oz copper written on the PCB in various images of the boards.
Look on the PCB between the CPU and memory slots here:
And likewise, 2oz copper PCB is visible after the last white PCI slot by the XFastest logo:
Gigabyte reckons 67 per cent of motherboards it shipped during the week before Computex were 2oz copper and that by the end of the year, that figure will come closer to 80 per cent. At Computex Gigabyte told us it didn't at all mind absorbing a little of the cost at sale time due to the firm's three year warranty, as the better quality PCB purportedly saves the company service costs.
Perhaps Asus has realised that adding two ounces of what it previously claimed to be a polluting metal might be good for business after all. No harm in polluting, er, testing the waters at least.
Also, since Asus has decided to bung its 2oz copper on its becoming-ever-more-fashionable DDR3 boards, punters can expect to pay a rather whopping premium for them.
That's what we call testing the marketing team's metal. Asus and co better hope this won't be a copp-out. µ
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It's great to see all these anti-ASUS comments on here. I though I was the only one who thought the boards were overpriced crap. I purposely avoid ASUS boards and look for GA, EVGA and others.
As others mentioned, customer support is terrible. BIOS and driver support seems to disappear almost overnight as ASUS moves on to the next board. Even if you can get a new BIOS, it's a dice roll on whether you'll corrupt it or not.
I don't think they make crap because of diversified products; rather they make crap because many still believe in the old hype (which was once earned) and still pay too much for sub-standard motherboards.
I remember my first Athlon MB, the K7M. Asus was so afraid of Intel they shipped the board in a plain white box. That was then and look at now. They are still followers. Sad. And their boards are bloody expensive. I do like my gigabyte 2oz copper board though. Lots of toys in the bios and dual bios for me to screw with.
cheers.
2oz copper is more about current carrying capabilities than heat dissipation. Traces with lower voltage drops at any given current will get less hot. Make 'em wider or make 'em thicker - and ffs design a case environment which has some decent thermal/airflow characteristics and doesn't need more noisy blowers inside it than the Spruce Goose had on its wings.
ALL the boardmakers have had bad days/months/years. Like others here and after a few decades of experience I tend to the rule of thumb that when a boardmaker diversifies into other products (Asus video cards anyone?) it's time to look for alternatives.
(To the young pup with comments about HP printers: there was a time when HP was a test equipment and scientific instrument maker that went downmarket and started selling printers which didn't just interface to its own instruments/computers.)
BIOSes ALL suck, some rather harder than others. LinuxBIOS goes a long way towards allieviating the situation...
ALL the board makers got bitten by dud caps in 1998-2003 - even the large OEMs - and almost the entire SE asian consumer electronics production industry. Any that continue to get bitten need to do more due diligence and start using chummy buyers who get suckered for the shark bait they really are.
At the end of the day a maker is only as good as their last board and a system is only as good as the system and the person assembling it. Choose carefully...
Asus... take away you and what are you left with... giga did send a batch of bad boards... the Z line of boards was the worst... i went with MSI/ASUS like the dude with 90%/10%/40%... still trying to do the math. When the SB7XX came around... Giga some how found back that spark and from then on... Giga all the way...
To Ken's comment on 2oz copper. Typically 1oz boards start with 1/2 oz base stock and the traces are plated up to 1oz. The remainder of the 1/2 oz material is then etched away. this makes the trace profile the most predictable. 2oz boards can start with 1 oz stock and be plated up to 2 oz if trace accuracy is critical, but more often 1/2 oz stock is used and ususally 2 oz copper is used only on layers carrying power or on plane layers to move heat. It is most likely that none of these boards have more than one or two layers out of 6 or 8 that are plated up to 2 oz. It is also possible to plate up only those areas of a layer that actually need the extra copper and at Mobo volumes that is very likely what is done. Further, any etched copper is recycled back into the copper supply. The bottom line is that there is no environmental issue of any merit, just the question of engineers using the tools they have to best advantage.
Well Supermicros are excellent motherboards, mostly designed for Workstations and Servers.Ofcourse they don't fail with ease and are stable as a rock.Unfortunately sometimes are that much expensive (for a Xeon one i say) that are out of reach of the average customer.
And as for ABIT: RIP.There were times that these were unmatched (BH6 anyone?).
What is a good PCB design and excellent assembly quality good for if the BIOS is SHI*T?
I've had lot's of boards from almost all brands that could be had at the time...
I really miss Abit! R.I.P ;(, even if I had bad boards from them as well swelling caps anyone? But I had the same ssue on ASUS, EPOX as well.
I don't like GB or MSI for their BIOSes: What's a ton of settings good for if it doesn't even notice you've changed something??? Reverting to defaults after every 1week to 6 months of 101% stable operation? WHY?
I hate ASUS for the problems described before me, BUT, Do I have any other option? Do I want instable, unconfigurable, and unreliable boards? NO!
I believe I will have to get used to some overpriced ASUS boards failing on me every once in a while...
If GB would consolidate their BIOS team I'm definitely changing!
I stay with a brand usually until I get failures. Abit lost me years ago, and went thru biostar and msi also. Gigabyte came and went. Lately I've been using ASrock with good results. Haven't benchmarked anything, but they aren't DOA and haven't failed yet in their early years.
loving my EX58 UD5. class core i7 board :-)
Over the years I have used pretty much every board manufacturer you can think of.
I've had Gigabytes that were DOA, Asus boards that just refused to be stable and reliable.
There is only one brand of board that I have *never* had a problem with. In fact I still have 2 machines using them. One is an AMD K6-266 CPU, so it gives you and idea how long I've had it.
The motherboards, Supermicro.
Are these solid or liquid BS ounces? Hello, welcome to the 21st century!
One P2C board in 1997 (Pentium-II 400)
Two P3Cs boards in 1999 and 2000 (Pentium-III 500 and 800)
One CUV266 board in 2001 (Pentium-III 1GHz)
One P4C board in 2003 (Pentium 4 2.4GHz)
Five P4C800-E boards from 2004 to 2006 (Pentium 4 2.4, 2.8, 3.0, 3.2 and 3.2 GHz)
All Asus. No problems. YMMV, of course.
Well, when you have bought some mainboards and dont work as intended, what do you do???Buy again maybe once or twice.I had problems with Gigabytes much more than i had with Asus or MSI or even DFI(just use sth that's not cheapo for this one...).
@Timboj
Buying another one that fails is bad business.
As for the service i can not talk about it.I am just phoning them and they change the mobo.Maybe as a customer this could be different(DFI needed RMA to TW till recently i think).
P.S. I don't know why, but high end nvidia chipsets tend to fail,in general not just on gb or asus but eveywhere.
P.S.#2 They all fail.Every single mobo maker will have good and bad products.
I had a few of my own
GA-6BXC bad oc but the mobo was ok, and it still works in a construction yard.
Asus a8v-pro v2.0: Incompatible with first batch of 9800pro(only agp 4x viable) + HL2 engine.this is a known problem as a whole with this mobo
DFI CFX3200-DR/G: Cold boot bug, still havent rmaed it(15 to go 15 to come is one month without a PC)
Other models are well.
I guess i am damn unlucky with gigabytes, Or they are crap.Whatever happens I just don't buy them for my store even if i buy them far cheaper than the same feature rich ASUS.
I am not a fanboy.I just work with those things.And believe me i have plenty stories of horror for almost every company's products out there, even for IBM (DEATHSTARS ANYONE????)
I had a Gigabyte board once. It was great, but the caps ballooned and I repaired it, then one day it failed for good. So far so much the same as the rest of the comments on this article.
Unlike most of you idiots I never claimed that the failure of one board meant Gigabyte as a company is "dodgy". Every motherboard manufacturer has sent out a dodgy batch of boards or even a dodgy design, it's a fact of manufacturing. Get over it.
@Timboj I must agree with you. I recently changed to Gigabyte boards after Asus started selling whole desktop systems - why compete with your supplier? I have not had a single Gigabyte motherboard return in 8 months, touch wood.
I'd say that Gigabyte's focus is still very much on motherboards and that's why Asus is following them. I'm happy with my new board supplier.
I bought one of the UD3 boards because at the time it was one of the cheapest Nehalem boards and the last 2 GB systems I built were great. I certainly would have bought a cheaper 1oz version if it existed.
@plan - 90% of your sales are ASUS and 10% are MSI... 40% return on 0 Gigabyte sales means 0. Make sense, guy.
I've just recently switched to GB after having used ASUS forever. Too many issues for me in the last couple of builds.
I have built 5 systems with asus in the last 2 years and 10 with biostar, come one even a m2n32-sli deluxe died cuz of southbridge temperature with their awsome stack cools technology, and the biostar mobos, most of them (9) are still alive, it makes me wonder who is doing fine out there...
@ .plan: I had once a asus mainboard that s****d, i had once a msi board that s****d even more. Since 1998 i'm using only gigabyte boards for the pc's i build for myself or friends and i never had a problem with any of the pc's i've build. In the past i've created 10 pc's with asus mainboards (4 of them broke few days after warranty was over) and 13 with msi (3 of them died after warranty was over). Now i have created allmost 70 pc's with gb mainboards, sapphire videocards, kingston memory, wd or samsung hd's and amd cpu's and all of them are still working flawlessly :)
How do the likes of Asus and Seagate survive out there?!
Come on, i know it has something to do with morons like the one above me chatting sh_it. Look when people/company like Gigabyte with their superb customer support - even allowing one to download drivers and everything for even old boards from the p3 era,... come on.
Asus on the other hand, i always thought of them as the name suggests and sounds like, not to mention the way they act, 'Ass' or 'Arse' and time and again they proove it to me why they are arses!
As for Seagate, these retards, don't guarantee customers data on their HDDs when western digital has the slogan 'data you can put your life on' and with their recent twin chip HDDs the performance is near bloody sata raid without all the extra baggage and hassle.
3 sh_it things to hate Asus (Ass) about: 1, the use of USB for the keyboard and mouse (sucks at gaming when other things are connected via USB). 2, the use of AMI bios (Award is much better, friendly and easy to work with). 3, taking dodgy short-cuts in components hence things become unreliable and high failure rate not to mention durability sucks!
There are probably many others, but whats the point... the deaf, dumb and the blind can't be helped so let things run the course!
Well i run a computer shop and Asus is 90% of my sales.The rest are MSI.
Had some problems with ASRocks: particular models, with VIA SB's, they were losing the HDD'S every now and then, others were dying when overclocked(done thrice and never again). MSI's are mostly ok, but GB are the worst i vever had.Sorry people but 40% return is NOT nothing. 7 years in this job evey now and then i get some, and the horror starts....GB is crap.period.
Here’s how the Taiwanese PC hardware boys line up. Gigabyte is your clean-cut, religion spouting, Every Ounce Accounted For Honest John who tries his best and he's getting better at it - though many a worshipper paid the price along the way. Asus is your Chosen Few driven, Yankee-do-da, Mouth O'Matic, sugar coated, cheapo ala fashionata - and if need be, he'll turn the Honest John trick for a loss leader - "AhSus, honalable can do everything". [Non-]Americano at its finest. As for the likes of MSI, "Let sleeping dogs lie", should suffice. The number of failed attempts at orbiting a mere marble defies belief. Is something genetic going on, one wonders. To be fair, a couple of ants did complete a "Branson Orbit". But one fine day, they shall all be acrossed the straits. "Now, what shall we named the new province".
My last board was an ASUS board, and that is the last ASUS board I'll buy. After issue after issue, I've written them off. They can only live so long on their old reputation before the customers will quietly start switching to different products. Oh, and their website sucks big-time.
I got burned for a bad batch (100+) Asus boards many years ago. Humidity condensation acid corrosion due to poorly neutralization process.
I decided to give them another try last year and ended up with another bad experience. I received a bad board, tried to live with the multiple problems. I finally gave up because of intermittent data corruption (ASUS said it was a bad ICH10R controller) and RMA it (waiting for replacement).
ASUS produces more MBs than other manufacturers though, sometimes options win out. I didn't realize ASRock was a sister to ASUS. Thanks to the poster for the info.
This article is partially wrong - what they wrote about using 2oz copper instead of industry standard 1oz copper does not mean they use 2oz more copper per board. the copper weight specified is the amount used per square foot of a single layer of copper on the blank PCB stock material the board layers are etched from. 2oz copper is twice as thick, which results in higher current capacity (and higher thermal conductivity) for the same width trace wiring on the board layer. It also affects the RF properties of the finished board, including the impedance of the traces (important on memory, QPI, HT, PCI, PCI-express, and USB/firewire data buses, among others) and the loss tangent (impacts the maximum distance a signal will travel on the board wiring before it is too weak). All of this is OK as the design can be modified to perform equivalently with either copper thickness. Thicker copper really only helps when dealing with reliability issues (thicker traces mean more resistance to cracking due to thermal cycling), high current wiring (for instance the Vdd wiring between the VRM and the CPU socket), and occasionally when using the PCB copper layers as a significant portion of the thermal sink, as in the mounting for some power-BGA packages with a large die slug in the center of the package. The reason Asus was saying it is more environmentally damaging to use more copper is twofold - it requires more copper to be mined, which is usually a pit mining process, and it also usually roughly doubles the amount of copper that will be etched away into toxic waste etchant solution while manufacturing the PCB. The actual amount of copper left on the PCB is rather minimal, perhaps 3-4 ounces assuming a standard 1oz 8-layer ATX board with approximately 50-75% copper coverage per layer.
I have put together 2 gaming rigs using Gigabyte Ultra Durable boards. Both were a pleasure to work with, great documentation too, they work great. I highly recommend Gigabyte MOBOs.
Sent a new defective mobo back for replacement. Got a filthy dirty used mobo that someone had replace caps on... Asus has no customer support. Their website and tech support is an insult to anyone with a clue.
bought me an Asus lappy about 3 years ago, very happy with it, still works fine. so i bought me an Asus mainboard two weeks ago, and the hard disk controller performance is shocking, and the network performance is half that of my old Nvidia NF2 board with a PCI intel Gig NIC board.
hopefully this is just driver problems, but not impressed.
asus website bites aswell
+1 on the Thermal imaging Gigabyte used to illustrate what was going on. The images support what I found when I added a CPU waterblock to my EVGA X58(759) Classified motherboard - The CPU fan is essential in keeping the VREG cool.
I installed a small asus vreg fan while waiting for my vreg block.
If 2oz copper really solves this, I could have saved ~40 dollars (fittings, Koolance vreg cooler and heat transfer plate) as well as heat from my loop. Good work if... well...it works!
I too hate it when companies that are recognised as the leader in the field of a certain type of product suddenly feel they have to diversify into everything.
It always ends in the same result, everything they sell ends up mediocre.
HP is a fine example. Used to make great indestructable printers. Now? Oh dear.
There is nothing wrong in being really good at just one thing.
I too hate it when companies that are recognised as the leader in the field of a certain type of product suddenly feel they have to diversify into everything.
It always ends in the same result, everything they sell ends up mediocre.
HP is a fine example. Used to make great indestructable printers. Now? Oh dear.
There is nothing wrong in being really good at just one thing.
Since Asus decided to be the electronics supplier of the world instead of sticking to mobos, which at one time they actually knew something about, their products have been half-baked, problem riddled crap, as documented by any number of websites and consumers.
They can use all the copper they want but it can't compensate for bad mobo design or defective production.