On Tue, 08 May 2018 14:56:54 -0300, Shadow wrote:

The only constant was the MB itself.

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My last, or near, ASUS became intermittent though functional. After 5
or so years I started to feed it power supplies. Every year or so I'd
give it a PS. It seemed to like them. Good enough, I figured, for
nursing it along. Eventually too much of good things get old, maybe
when the MB had 8-years' usage, when it bit my hand.

I had an usual PS: Fortron or Sparkle, strictly server grade. Pick up
that Sparkle and it wasn't like other power supplies. Somewhat
compact and smaller than usual, it was its weight -- heavy as
literally a brick. Not to mention quality, but class was written all
over it.

I plugged it into the ASUS one day and it got killed and died
horribly. Stank like nothing else I'd run into for just a little wisp
of accompanying smoke. I eventually switched over to Gigabyte MBs.

I also used to talk with someone in realtime online MIRC chat forum.
He carried a grudge against ASUS after working for them:
Age-discrimination, he thought their revolving workforce for skewed
younger people unfair. He also told me he had watched QC and overall
engineering implementation decline. A conversation some years before
I bought that board...ah, here it is:

K8N-E+(Deluxe) using an AMD 754 3000 with 5-PCI slots for "back in
the day." Half price, though, for a $100US MB sold by a once
reputable distributor: Someone's return on, I presumed, all-thumbs
when it comes to hardware assembly.

That same distributor wouldn't now think twice about cutting a throat
with known trashed hardware, for nowhere near the same discounts, nor
will offer any provision for honoring reversed charges on return
shipping for discrepancies with merchandise promoted "as new". These
days there's only one plan to have: the best cut-&-dried kind.