WRX90-E SAGE motherboard: ASUS tech support is providing incorrect answers

[no_target]

ASUS official tech support does not have correct answers about this board, and yet they are confidently and repeatedly providing incorrect information about the BMC and the advertised support for ACCE "Remote Desktop", which does not work for this board's AST2600 BMC chipset. They are providing incorrect default login credentials and which user manual to use, which makes it impossible to install an OS on this product remotely. Until ASUS gets the message that their support team does not have correct information, users of this board are advised to ignore answers they get from tech support and refer to user solutions found here about the BMC. The correct information is in the accepted solution Here.

I hope this post is read by a manager within the product management team for this board, and they course correct. The board hardware is functionally excellent, and this support and documentation experience drags the product down terribly. Additionally, the advertised support for ACCE should be removed, as ACCE does not work at all with "Remote Desktop" or KVM as is made clear by both the ACCE product pages and the software's error dialog that clearly states it only works with the RTK8117 BMC chipset.

[lmacmil2]

My opinion of Asus tech support went way down when they issued 2 consecutive BIOSes for my B760M board that disabled XMP.  It would seem like a no-brainer that if XMP is working with one BIOS and then not with the next one, and there have been no hardware changes that the BIOS must be the problem.  If they had spent half as much time fixing their code as they did trying to prove the problem was with my system, they would have solved the problem much sooner.  As a result I am always reluctant to update the BIOS  and waited about 6 versions before I did it again.  I can report positively that the 1805 BIOS works as it should including XMP.

[no_target]

In this case, it’s a TR Pro mb that costs nearly $2,000 in the retail channels. Not only is the support team giving wrong information, they bundled a license for  Asus’s own management software (ACCE) and yet the software doesn’t support the motherboard for ACCE Remote Desktop, which is a function that is specifically advertised in the motherboard web pages (and also the most important feature, as you can't remotely install an OS without it). When you open the box and scan the URL they provide, you get a software product that fails to work to install an OS, then when you contact tech support, they waste hours of your time making you believe it’s your problem, when in fact they are just guessing solutions and letting you run around like you are their employee.

I have designed, purchased and installed many thousands of servers in my time and have run large teams to manage them. This is a complete failure of the product and support teams.

[no_target]

The issue I described, support providing false information, just got worse. I reached out via the "CEO Feedback" link to complain about this, including a link directly to this post, and here is the response I received:

I am reaching out to our technicians to confirm, but I do still show that your motherboard is compatible with this software. Unfortunately we would not be able to provide you with a refund as that is done through the place of purchase, and did you receive the license key that came with the unit? if so can you clarify what it was so that we can confirm if its correct? I look forward to your reply and will follow up with you further within 2 business days.

This response clearly demonstrates that the responder "from the CEO's office" did not actually read the post. As I explained in my response to them:

Your reply is again superficial and unacceptably false. On what basis did you conclude this mb is compatible with ACCE software? You own web pages on it clearly state that it is not, a fact that I have documented in the posts on Zentalk forums. I can only conclude that you have not read my posts there, which is unacceptable. Also there, I documented that the software itself provides a clear error message that confirms it is not compatible with this motherboard. Of course I have the correct license key, as you would know if you had read the post, so again it appears that you did not.

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The Asus technical support staff continue to treat this case as though the customer can't understand their products. They refuse to actually read this information, as though it isn't important to them. I can only come to one conclusion: it is not important to them that their product does not work.

In case someone actually reads this far, here are the acceptable solutions to this issue, based on my experience running a very successful large high performance server and software company:

• First, read the error posting in it's entirety and respond to the details correctly. This would include a reaction to your own product pages noting that the ACCE product is incompatible with the chipset on this motherboard. By "incompatible", I mean that the advertised critical "Remote Desktop" function within ACCE only works on the RTK8117 chipset, and not the AST2600 chipset on this motherboard.
• Second, apologize publicly in this forum for the actions of the technical support team, who repeatedly provided false information about this problem, including not knowing if there was a manual for the BMC functionality, eventually providing the wrong manual, and not knowing or being able to find out what the correct default login credentials were for the BMC.
• Third, have the product management team evaluate the missing functionality with ACCE and provide a correction on the product web page that clearly states the missing features in ACCE, and state when and if this will be corrected. This is a legal requirement at a minimum, as the advertising is currently false.
• Fourth, provide a link to the correct manual for the BMC in PDF form in the support pages for this product, so that this doesn't happen again.

Asus may be thinking they're the only game in town here and maybe that's why they are screwing this up so badly. You should know that there are ways to fix that, some of which dovetail nicely with the incoming administration in the US. Become an ally and partner or you risk becoming obsolete and irrelevant.

[no_target · Accepted solution]

OK - I'm finally getting closer to the facts on this. The motherboard pairs a Realtek 8117 (RTL8117) network mac/phy with the AST2600 BMC to implement the OOB management features. Asus is correct that their product documentation is consistent in that for ACCE it says that you must have a RTL8117 to be supported, so I stand corrected on the product documentation, it is consistent.

I'm still left with two issues about this product support:

1. one is that ACCE is failing to provide KVM and throwing errors including "unsupported...need RTL8117" and same but "need vPro" and it doesn't proceed, which is a bug of some kind.
2. the documentation for the AST2600 is missing from the product support pages, and as I've written, there is a nice document elsewhere under the product name "ASMB11-iKVM" that provides the correct default login credentials needed to install anything remotely.

Since I'm already up and running with the manual I found, and don't really need the ACCE to do anything, I'm fine with the product as it is. I'll close this and hope they fix the remaining issues themselves.