Wednesday, May 14th 2008
GIGABYTE: ASUS Lied and Fooled Customers
I will finish my day reporting a story published by Tom's Hardware that involves two big motherboard manufacturers - GIGABYTE and ASUS. According to GIGABYTE's technical team, ASUS is lying about its EPU (Energy Processing Unit) energy efficiency performance figures and is playing tricks with its users. ASUS claims that EPU outfitted motherboards can deliver up to 80.23% "power savings" from motherboards without EPU components. Yea, but that's not what GIGABYTE thinks. Test results from GIGABYTE's lab show that the claimed 80% energy efficiency is around 58.6% in reality, and ASUS is "playing numbers marketing" and "cheating end users." GIGABYTE engineers continued: "We found that [Asus'] EPU in 4 phase mode CAN NOT act PWM phase changing while Asus still claims EPU is a hardware based energy saving chip. Don't get fooled. The EPU (AIGear3+) is pure software based, not hardware!" "How can you believe it? Everything [Asus] say are lies," they added. GIGABYTE even pointed out that ASUS motherboards use poor quality non-Japanese solid capacitors. Read the full story here.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
64 Comments on GIGABYTE: ASUS Lied and Fooled Customers
- Christine
Non of this gimick epu stuff really works very well, want power savings, down clock and drop voltage, let your hard drives spin down, leave speedstep enabled etc...
I'm having all kinds of issues with Asus motherboards for the last 3-4 years that relate to quality.
I'm talking about +500 mb's where around 20 to 50 had some sort of problem related to quality. Not saying that Gigabyte mb's don't have issues but they are rearly quality related.
Asus is seriously cheaping out lately. Specially on the <100 euro mb's while Gigabyte is not.
sadly, I think GIGA fails to realize that this information has been floating around for a while - ASUS EPU design pales in comparison to GIGA's as far as efficiency goes, simply because of how ASUS' 8-phase power design works (they're either ON or they're OFF) - which is why you really only get about 50% energy savings . . .
and for those that OC, both GIGA's and ASUS' energy saving designs go out the door, as they don't work properly with OCing and lead to an extremelly unstable system.
and to the comment from GIGA about ASUS PCB component quality . . . never had an issue here, with any of my boards . . . besides, I'd rather my PCB components come from Japan than China or Taiwan . . . isn't that right, GIGA?
Although it does look like ASUS goofed in their marketing, GIGA is just screaming wolf at this point. Both companies need to go back to the drawing board and get their energy efficiency designs worked out - cause neither one is perfect. ASUS' is more stable, but can't pull the same efficiency that GIGA's can.
<<edit>>
If I'm thinking about this right - ASUS is probably pulling their 80% figure by also taking into account CPU energy saving options . . . if you enable E1ST, TM and C1E on an Intel CPU, plus running a DDR3 board on an X38 chipset . . . yeah, you might just be able to achieve 80% overall, but it'd still be a little tough. EPU alone won't do it.
And besides, both companies are goofing with any energy efficieny implimentations right now - because they're only offered on HIGH-END motherboards . . . the kind of motherboards that tend to draw rabbid OCers like fly's to a pile of crap, and OCers don't give a wh00t1! over energy efficiency for the most part either . . . plus, neither company has announced plans to impliment these features in their mid-range boards yet . . .
:shadedshu
Asus has relatively better design boards but Gigabyte has better customer support and use better components and has more features for the same price.
Both the GIGABYTE Dynamic Energy Saver and the ASUS EPU options sound like a gimmick. What we need is a review of these two competing options.
Heck I hit 4ghz on this p5k-e, and going to try for 4.4ghz sometime here on air...
altho i also think that gigabyte pointing out that asus dont use good caps is just gigabyte trying to make them selves look better. but hey, two years back asus had the crown for premium motherboards, and imo it looks like gigabyte is taking that crown away from them, asus has got to stop using poor quality components, and as i say that i also say that gigabyte have got to smarten up and release their high end boards with marvell chipsets and not the shithouse realtek ones, otherwise imo gigabyte are pretty much doing the same thing for quality and the only thing they really have over asus in that regard is that their energy efficiency des crap actually works hardware based /rant
:p
Also check out the dead caps thread here on TPU, and those blue caps shown in the pics have been seen exploding a few times on some OC forums.