Asus PC-DL Deluxe: 875 with Dual Xeons
by Wesley Fink on September 6, 2003 12:06 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Asus PC-DL: Tech Support and RMA
For your reference, we will repost our support evaluation procedure here:
The way our Tech Support evaluation works is first, we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address(es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure we're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've had with our motherboard. We allow the manufacturer up to 72 (business) hours to respond, and then we will report whether or not they responded within the time allotted, and if they were successful in fixing our problems. In case we don’t receive a response before the review is published, any future responses will be added to the review, including the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.
The idea here is to encourage manufacturers to improve their technical support as well as provide new criteria upon which to base your motherboard purchasing decisions. As motherboards become more similar everyday, we have to help separate the boys from the men in as many ways as possible. As usual, we're interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews, so please do email us with your comments.
ASUS' RMA policy is pretty straight forward as follows:
“Please provide the following information so that we may process your request for warranty repair service. Once we have obtained that information from you, we will issue an RMA # and provide the proper shipping instructions. Please read and provide all of the information below. We cannot complete your request, if all of the information below is not
PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH:
1. THE MODEL & SERIAL NUMBER OFF OF YOUR PRODUCT model (name of product) serial# (10 digits/characters long, no dashes).
ASUS Computer International (USA) is a warranty repair service center. Please contact place of purchase for credit, refund, upgrade, or advance replacement. Asus does not provide these services under any circumstances.
2. YOUR FULL NAME/NAME OF COMPANY (Only provide company name if the shipping address is to a company).
3. YOUR SHIPPING ADDRESS (no PO boxes please).
4. YOUR DAYTIME PHONE/FAX NUMBER.
ASUS Does not cover physical damage. Please refer to page 2 of your users manual. There is a $15.00 fee to replace a broken socket. There is a $40.00 fee to repair all other physical damage. If a product is not repairable, the product will be sent back to the customer. If a product is sent in with physical damage and is not accompanied with a payment, the product will be rejected and customers will not be reimbursed for shipping charges. A payment can be made by check, money order (payable to ASUS), or a credit card#. The payment must be sent in with the damaged product. Customers from Canada must make payments with a credit card number.”
This is a fairly straightforward RMA policy, with nothing unusual that stands out. You're asked for quite a bit of information in regards to exactly what has to be RMA’d, but this is not unusual in any of the RMA procedures we have seen. Everything else is self-explanatory.
ASUS' tech support response time did not improve from the last time we looked at an ASUS motherboard. At that time, ASUS had yet again missed our 72 hour deadline, but they finally did reply to our email request 18 days after it was sent. The same pattern was repeated this time around, with ASUS again completely missing our 72 hour deadline. After so many missed tech support emails, it's clear your expectation with ASUS should be that your technical problem may get a reply some day!
While ASUS' RMA policy isn't too different from the other top tier motherboard makers, their tech support is still severely lacking. We sincerely hope Asus will finally take these issues seriously, and make efforts to fix a problem that has driven away many potential customers.
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29 Comments
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Kiwi42084 - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
This Benchmark is totally unfair!!!!!The PC-DL has the avalibility to produce 4 usable CPUs...2 Physical and 2 Logical....
Windows XP will only see 2 of these. The benchmarks are being done with Half of the POWER POTENTIAL.
vppaul - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
I am having a problem with my PC-DL board. The System Management BIOS is reporting that there is 4096 MB of RAM, but Windows reports that 2048 MB is available. Anybody ideas? I am trying to get help from Asus tech support but any help would be appreciated. Running dual 3.06 with 4 x 1GB sticks.piperfect - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
I totally agree with FutureShock999. Why not run several instances of the a divx encoder. For instance do a 2 part movie on an encoder that runs two threads per instance then run both of the parts at the same time in two instances of the program on the xeon and see who finishes first. What you guys are doing is like comparing an f-16 fighter jet to a f-15 and saying the f-15 can only use one of its engines.piperfect - Wednesday, February 11, 2004 - link
I got my pc-dl with 2.8GHz Xeons with raptor drives in RAID0 to 3361MHz 160FSB with a dram clock of 200MHz. 4:5 It ran Sandra burnin overnight. Maybe my board is a newer revision. I read this article after I bought the Raptor so I didn't try to overclock it until yeaterday but it did and it runs well!!!!!FutureShock999 - Monday, October 6, 2003 - link
Wesley,A nice review, but I believe the wrong benchmarks. No one should buy a dual-processor machine to execute a single-threaded application faster, especially when that single proc is slower than others on the market. Dual-proc boards are bought to do multi-threaded stuff, either runnig a single multi-threaded application, or running several different single-threaded applications. In no place did I see benchmarks that explicitly looked like that.
As such, your review was a good cautionary tale for people that didn't KNOW the above, and hopefully will stop some people from spending a lot of money on a this board hoping to have a great UT setup.
Now if you had shown what it was like to play a game, encode media, and download a few gigs of content SIMULTANEOUSLY, then we could really see how this board stacks up to the competition you evaluated it against. And I think it might have beaten them rather handily...
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
#23 -We recently changed our standard video card from nVidia's Ti4600 to the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO. Theoretically this should have no impact on encoding scores, but we reran all benchmarks with our new standard hadware on a few of the highest performing boards. Evan ran about half the new encoding benchmarks on the west coast, and I ran the other half on the east coast. As you can see our new results compare very well to each other.
I have no other explanation, but perhaps Evan can shed some light on this. I have used the new ATI Radeon 9800 PRO from day 1 and my benchmarks have been cumulative over the last couple of months with no dramatic change that you point out.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
The 865/875 P4 boards in this test all perform 50% faster in the media encoding benchmark in this review than they did in the round-up a couple weeks ago.Has anyone else noticed this dicrepancy? The Abit IS7-G has gone from 64.45 fps to 104 fps. Both times they used a P4 3.0Ghz, 800mhz FSB, with HT enabled. Nothing seems to have changed except the encoding speed. I wish I could do that to my rig ; )
A 50% increase in as linear and consistent a benchmark as DivX encoding is simply astounding.
I just wanted to point this out to everybody around here.
Thank you for your time.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
It' will not overclock with the SATA drives on the intel controller. BUT it will if you run them on the onboard promise controller. I have 2 WD Raptor's running RAID0 and the 2800/533's running @3250 100% stable.Anonymous User - Monday, September 8, 2003 - link
Which brings up the question about whether or not HT was enabled on it. And the fact is they used a regular consumer card for video Most workstations would have a workstation class card in them such as a Quadro, FireGL, or even a 3DLabs card in them. It all depends on the applications that one uses. Most normal people wouldn't use a dual machine for gaming anyways. They'd use them for graphical processing or media encoding or file serving and such. Just talk to those guys over at 2CPU.com they know what I'm talking about. ;)Anonymous User - Monday, September 8, 2003 - link
From the looks of it, there would be little if any reason to spend gobs of extra money on a system that is beat by AMD in gaming, and by single P4 siblings in high-end workstation tasks.