What a way to prepare for the new year, and those are probably the most sophisticated fireworks ever bought.
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Gross incompetence on the part of NZXT and Gigabyte; it would appear to be just a batch of bad bulk capacitors on the part of ACER, though there is some reason to believe that they were aware of it and were hoping to get away with it; and it’s looking like the issue with the Z690 Hero was just one of those mistakes that’s going to happen to every company at some point, and they accidentally loaded a batch of capacitors into the machine backwards, which is causing the MOSFETs to burn out. We’ll have to see though, and their response to this will also be kinda important. They’ll need to be more like Fractal Design, and less like NZXT.
And speaking of Fractal Design, don’t forget about this:
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Yeah, but I’m willing to give Fractal the pass due to how they handled it. They recognized an issue almost right after launch and proactively created an actual fix while admitting they messed up. NZXT and Gigabyte tried fighting it. Acer should have done a recall on the units within the bad batch. Asus never should have let that get through QA, but we’ll see what their response ends up being.
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It really shouldn’t have, but at the same time I can absolutely see how that could make it past. You’d have to know to look for it, and even if you tested the board unless you probed that exact cap you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. So I can see how it wouldn’t be caught. But their response is going be everything.
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Here’s a comment from Builzoid’s video:
“I work for a smd company and i have to say they fucked up at least three times. the pick n place machine is checking the marker on the cap before placing it, the automatic optical inspection failed to check the marker after it got placed and the final function test didnt cover the cap —> HUGE FAIL!
This happens when all these needed quality inspections are not given and when you have to get alternative caps from other suppliers cause the original ones are not purchasable anymore (thx to covid) and the other supplier puts the caps 180° reversed into the strap.”
On the positive side, seems like some motherboards are unaffected. I can’t imagine buying a 600$ mobo, that has the functionality of a matchbox.
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One thing about this comment, and that Jayztwocents also talked about: the unbalance in supply and demand is probably a reason a lot of this failures are happening right now. Pressure by lack of supply and having to come out of the blue with alternative components can easily lead to this kinds of failures in an engineering level. At manufacturing level, trying to maintain good metrics in productivity can lead up to bypass in QC checks.
Again, speculation but considering what I’m seeing in component shortages on my end, I wouldn’t be surprised. Still not justified, it’s their job to give a good product without any danger in the first place, so we should held them accountable. Fractal’s reaction is good but it should be the default reaction. Sadly it’s not.
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My old laptop crashed again. Seems it tried to perform, in spite of my strong denials, the same update that killed it previously. And this time, no restore option. I decided that was enough.
Picked up a new HP Omen Gaming laptop. Love the casing, it’s very slick and feels good to the touch. It has a cool multi-color backlit keyboard, 16.1" super nice screen, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, CORE i7 CPU, 16G RAM, .5GB SSD, Superfast USB, and… Windows 11. Sigh. The web site said it had win10 on it! Oh well. Had to happen sooner or later. So far so good, it’s really fast! Definitely not the fastest thing out there, but good enough for me.
It’s nice having something more up to date. Oh, it also has Bang & Olafsen audio, so it sounds fantastic. I have the stream going at 24/192, no EQ going at the moment, and I am not missing it right now. The audio is excellent. If I want EQ and the full Atmos experience, I can run the V40. I can relax on the computer front now!
I think I’m gonna take the old one and see if I can turn it into a linux machine. Should be a fun project.
@Raptor168 the best thing you can do for that new laptop is to do a fresh install of windows minus all of the vendor bloatware.
the hardest part about turning laptops into linux machines is figuring out which key gets you into BIOS to boot off of your usb drive
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Oh my god! I never knew there is such people still know what accountability is all about. I thought they are going to be one of those corporate pricks who would blame their customer base for so called messing up their products. Good job Fractal…for now.
On HP, you can usually hammer Esc during boot to get to a Diagnostic/Config screen. From there, you can easily get to the BIOS.
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Update to this, ASUS has issued a statement and is starting a recall process of the affected boards.
As expected, Buildzoid was correct in his assessment of the problem and it is the reversed capacitor that is the issue. But good on ASUS for being transparent and doing the right thing here.
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I would like to disagree here.
Any reasonably modern Pick&Place Machine SHOULD automatically flag reversed components on its infeed belt. This off course assumes someone cared enough to check what that error line two has is about…
There are also visual inspection machines that would catch a reversed capacitor. Unless Asus is producing in someones garden shed, they should have one of these!
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I’ll agree that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. What you are talking about was pointed out by someone in the comment section of the video that Buildzoid did, but what does that have to do with giving ASUS due respect for doing the right thing here, when they could have tried to act like the incidents were isolated and that there wasn’t anything wrong, when there clearly is? I mean, if someone is going to tear into NZXT or Gigabyte for for their poor handling of their own issues, they should also be equally willing to say “good job” to Fractal and ASUS when they handle their screw-ups right.
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Fractal had a Design Error. They caught it and reacted in the expected manner. Good.
Gigabyte was knowingly selling fire starters and continued doing so after having it pointed out to them. Fuck them.
Same with NZXT. They need to take their stupid “yank harder”-meme bullshit and stick it somewhere.
Asus with their mainboard issue has such brilliant QA, they have the general public doing it for them.
Imagine if some car company, Ford, Volkswagen, etc. was doing like Asus did here. You don’t install the starter backwards and not notice!
It is not expected to be fixed as soon as noticed, it is EXPECTED TO BE FIXED BEFORE IT IS THE CUSTOMERS PROBLEM!
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Again, I’m not arguing that point. It should have been caught during assembly, but I’m not going to rake them, or any company, over the coals when they do the right thing when something slips through QC. The only thing that does is send the message that the only way to win is to never fuck up, and no-one is ever going to have a 100% fuck-up-less record.
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I completely agree that this never should have happened. The non-tech people I’ve talked to about this, I’ve used the comparison of switching which post your car battery wires are connected to. It’s a stupid simple thing that never should happen, and will lead to something going up in smoke.
On the other hand, I will give them props for not pulling a Gigabyte or NZXT and fighting it. Instead, they’ve admitted there was a problem, and are issuing a recall. For that, I will give them some props. Never should have made it passed production and QA, but at least they are admitting a mistake was made.
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I agree but while i get the analogy its a little different in this case, Car manufacturers control in a more rigorous manner than the production of their product (for various reasons), computer hardware on the other hand is somewhat different. In a lot of cases the boards are designed by a certain company like Asus, but assembled by a 3rd party, in this case I’m assuming its Foxconn which assembled the board in an improper manner.
While it’s still a total fuck up on Asus’s part its no where near the dumb-fuck move made by NZXT and Gigabyte who both had made design flaws regardless of how well they were made and made shitty choices on both the design and handling of the situation. Asus’s releaized the error and did what any proper company should do, Recall - its the best you can do in a shitty situation, while they don’t deserve a “golden star”, acting in a respectable manner is something that can be noted
P.S car manufactures do have major fuckups, but unlike PC hardware its harder to tell right away and their lawyers are pretty fucking good. I worked at an insurance company for 3 years and have seen a few claim where it was “the car’s fault”
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Just finished it and wanted to show off
Its not perfect but pretty damn close 
CPU: 5800X
RAM:Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB
Cooling: EK 360 Basic
GPU: RTX 2070 super Asus dual OC
PSU: Corsair RM850x
Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow (with a bunch of Lian LI SL fans)
Storage:
- 1TB NVME WD Black (Gen 4)
- 512GB NVME Samsung Evo Plus
- 2 X 1TB WD blue SSD
- 2 X 6TB WD red HDD
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As ordered…
