I can tell you how I got duped into buying their product - a Zephyrus G14:

ASUS at the time had an exclusive deal with AMD to ship their Ryzen 4xxxHS line.

Initially it worked fine, but two years later performance was already much worse and dominated by thermal throttling. Repasting, though necessary due to the state of the paste, only helped partially.

I still don't know the root cause of the issue, but I investigated declining battery performance and it turned out that the iGPU was going full throttle at all times. Setting the dGPU as the preferred device actually improved battery life somewhat.

When mechanical failures started accumulating I switched to a FW16 and never looked back. I don't care what gaming laptop manufacturers have on offer and for how little if I can't buy having them give a shit about their products and customers.

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matheusmoreira 6 days ago | parent [-]

I bought a Clevo-based gaming laptop for programming because it had a good CPU. It was a really bad decision.

It will thermal throttle itself to uselessness within seconds of a load being placed on it. The dGPU idles at about 15 W, the entire power budget of a single board computer, and it's one of those problematic nvidia GPUs that will never be properly supported on Linux. The Windows app that controlled things like fans and keyboard LEDs was so obnoxiously bad they required over one minute to show a window on the screen, reverse engineering that thing was one of the best things I've ever done. Mercifully the firmware wasn't broken by default but I still didn't manage to reverse engineer the ACPI nonsense, I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but there was nothing useful.

Looks like Apple has a monopoly on good taste and giving half a shit about the quality of the products they sell. I wish the Apple silicon macbooks existed at the time.

	▲	Tade0 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was considering such a device since surely those huge vents meant good thermals, right? Glad I didn't go for it. With the ASUS I had a setup with a cooling pad where the metal grid cover was removed and the sides were sealed with foam to enhance flow from the pad's fan and only with that I could maybe get 30-45min of gameplay until throttling started. Meanwhile the Framework has overall much higher power consumption, but still manages to whoosh all that hot air out. I can't take these companies seriously if a much smaller business that is not focused squarely on gaming is running circles around them. My mother rocks an M1 Air which she got for pennies and it's a great all around home computer.