ASUS website location?

[Grall]

I don't know if you people have noticed, but ASUS appears to have hosted their websites in a data center consisting of old IBM PS/2 boxes, located on the farside of the moon.......

I'm trying to download a BIOS update for my Rampage II Gene mobo, and it's just taking friggin' forever. I hope this update will prevent my 4890s from slowing down in a weird manner after the PC's been up for some time, but who knows? The other day I got crackling noise in the sound output during gaming whenever there was big disk I/O going on, so something sure is screwy...

I probably should try updating the graphics drivers also, now that there's a new catalyst out. Gahh... Win7 can't come fast enough, so that I can do a clean reinstall!

 

[Davros]

pick a different region, one where its nightime

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

That site is always slow as shit, no matter which download location you pick. Cant say its different for alot of other brands btw. Gigabyte and MSI are also always so slow that you could send a freakin' pigeon and be faster.

 

[entity279]

Oh yeah, 3-4 years ago i was downloading stuff from asus with <20 KB/s maximum.

As a brand, i believe they made quite a big progress since then (unfortunately, is also my least favorite), but it's funny to hear their site is still crap.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think all their files are still hosted on a FTP site in Taiwan.

Regards,
SB

 

[stevem]

Try ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb

 

[Grall]

I managed to DL the update, the chinese server actually responded pretty much instantly while the world server still hadn't uttered a peep after over a minute of waiting.

Of course, updating both BIOS and video driver did not fix my slowdown issue. Yum, I so love Microsoft OSes and their mountains of freakishly bizarre, un-reproduceable bugs...

I often (well, make that "often") hear about people who don't like ASUS stuff, but it's hard to find better featured and more robust mobos than their Republic of Gamers series. I like my Rampage II Gene board, it's got everything I might wish for really, and some that I don't even need (like the eSATA plugs for example). At the same time it's well-constructed and pretty much as well-laid-out as you can get in a uATX form factor with 6 DIMM slots, dual 16x PEG slots, 6+2 SATA connectors, IDE connector and so on.

Lately I've seen there's one or two other comparable uATX boards, but this one's still the nicest on the whole I think. And you can hook up that uber cool (in a nerdy kind of way) OC Station to this board too.

The others don't have anything like that.

 

[Davros]

Oi, esata rocks...

 

[Grall]

Personally I feel eSata's pretty worthless since there's no power delivered through the connector. I hate the need for separate wall wart transformers if I was to hook up an external drive for example, why the hell didn't they just put some 12V-pins in there while they were busy designing a brand new connector?

Incomprehensible, and unforgivable. This IMO pretty much doomed eSata into obscure uselessness.

 

[Davros]

when i connect my external drive via esata its faster than my internal drive
thats not the case if i connect it via usb
external convenience, internal performance

 

[pcchen]

Personally I feel eSata's pretty worthless since there's no power delivered through the connector. I hate the need for separate wall wart transformers if I was to hook up an external drive for example, why the hell didn't they just put some 12V-pins in there while they were busy designing a brand new connector?

Incomprehensible, and unforgivable. This IMO pretty much doomed eSata into obscure uselessness.

There is a "power-over-eSATA" initiative more than a year ago. IIRC OCZ has some eSATA flash drive supporting these powered eSATA ports. I don't know how many MB supporting these ports, though.

 

[Davros]

ps: my hdd caddie also needs separate power if i connect the hdd via usb (not sure if this is always the case though)

 

[Miksu]

Yeah, Asus' website is amazingly slow and like someone else already mentioned, the same goes to other motherboard makers too.

 

[Rolf N]

ps: my hdd caddie also needs separate power if i connect the hdd via usb (not sure if this is always the case though)

2.5" external HDDs (and HDD cases) can generally be powered over USB. I have a full set (2.5" SATA, 2.5" IDE and one for "slim"/laptop optical drives) and they all work fine with just the USB plug connected.

 

[Grall]

The most recent 2.5" drives have a REALLY low power draw, even during full seek operations. The new Hitachi drive maxes out at like 2.3W or something like that.

Makes me smile when I remember yesteryear's 5.25" monster SCSI harddrives with like 8-10 platters in them that pulled upwards of 75W during startup... Ungh! I had a couple such units in the past lying around for nostalgia's sake, but I eventually got rid of them. They made a tremendous racket just by running idly, bearing noise and internal air resistance from ~18 heads made them sound like mini turbine compression fans... Those were the days!

Oh, and they had fabulous capacities also, around 2-5GB or so! Whoah. Ugly old brutes they were...