karab44 wrote:
Is this a flagship ASUS product or a joke?

Even if I omit the funny apps there are 16 motherboard drivers left packed separately.

Please don't confuse "flagship" with "ease of use". This is an enthusiasts product and as such having the flexibility to tweak or install what you want, when you want it is what makes this board powerful. The provided dvd is meant to give you a good base. Hell I don't even use it since I know most of the drivers are out date from the start and smart suite is a learning tool.

If you are buying it for status or to have one button setup you might be better off buying a dell.

Sorry but I don't mean to be harsh but I don't think any enthusiast would ask for a one click install to blow away all of their drivers.
Sometimes you only need to update one.

jdpg265 wrote:
Please don't confuse "flagship" with "ease of use". This is an enthusiasts product and as such having the flexibility to tweak or install what you want, when you want it is what makes this board powerful.

Sorry but I don't follow your thinking...
What "ease of use" has to do with "enthusiasts product"? There is something called the quality of a product. I use PC's for 20 years and nowadays forcing user to do monkey job with manually juggling all these files is not the way of providing quality to a product. As far as I understand you, all enthusiasts are copying thousands of files one by one from FTP server to update Windows? Is this what "enthusiasts" mean to you? I don't understand...

Please... you can get the same control and flexibility over the installation with kind of some notifier/updater but in more convenient and time-saving way. On other hand if it extisted nobody tells you to use it. You could keep downloading your files manually if you wish.



Chino, thank you for a hint. EZ Update never ever updated a single file for me. I checked the fw rules and they're ok. Instead of that I spent some time writting a script which downloads and batches all motherboard drivers and AI Suite3 with dependencies straight from support website. It's a bit awkward but still better than downloading the files manually. I personally use tools provided from ASUS except these dedicated for gaming only.

I think in this matter ASUS still has a lot of space for improvements.

Well, it may be painful at first, but there are only a dozen or so files to download and with a 'mature' board like the RVE that has been out for well over a year now, the driver base is fairly stable. What I mean is that they don't change much now, and really it seems that only the BIOS gets an update every few months - and that will eventually slow to a stop unless there is some major issue or new hardware support that will justify a fresh BIOS..

karab44 wrote:
Is this a flagship ASUS product or a joke?

Even if I omit the funny apps there are 16 motherboard drivers left packed separately.

Even if they did supply people with a all in one driver setup i wouldn't use it as 99% of Asus drivers are 6 months out of date when there posted for download.