Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsAbsolute piece of garbage. Do not buy!!!
Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2022
I thought Asus was a serious computing company. I have an Asus motherboard in my PC that I built in 2012 and still works, and I built a few other PCs over the years with their motherboards. But after this monitor and another cheaper Asus I had bought earlier, I'm done with that company.
This monitor is targeted towards creative professionals, hence the "ProArt" name. Well, a large portion of creative professionals use Macs, and newer Macs only have USB-C/Thunderbolt 3/4 ports for the monitor. This thing is supposed to come with a USB-C port, and it doesn't work for Macs! It's ridiculous!
But it doesn't stop there. You go online and you find out that for that to work you have to download and perform two firmware updates, one for the monitor and another for the USB-C port itself. That in itself sounds ridiculous, but the frustration doesn't end there, in far it's only the early beginning.
You download the two firmware updates, and you find out that for the port update, you have to do it from a Windows PC with an USB-C port connected to the monitor. This is fix a problem that only happens with M1 Macs. Are you effing kidding me?????
But let's say you are a Mac user but have a work laptop that is Windows based and has an USB-C port. The main firmware update is not performed with any PC or Mac, you're supposed to format a USB stick as FAT32 and copy there the BIN file. Then you start reading this hilarious document that is obviously written in very poor English, which you can read in the screenshots I uploaded here.
You can find the most hilarious errors in this, like:
"5. To turn off PA329CV AC switch."
To turn off what? I guess it means just "Turn off" that switch? Or do you have to do something else to turn it off?
Then comes the best:
"6. Long press the 1th button from the right."
"8. Release the 1th button when power indictor ON and image display."
"9. Press the 1nd button from the right to display and enter the OSD menu."
What is the "1th" button? Maybe the "firth". And the "1nd" button? Is it the "Onend" button? Perhaps it's a number between 1 and 2?
Now, if this was some Asian company that doesn't have a presence in the US and sells small things, so they can't really afford a proper translation, I wouldn't care. I see that all the time.
But this is Asus, a company with decades in the industry, with an established presence in the US, and actually offices here. So this pathetic lack of detail from a company that has plenty of employees in its US offices that could easily fix this, speaks volumes about what their products are.
But that's not even the worst part. I tried to follow that procedure. I'm a tech nerd. I'm good with computers and electronics in general. But I spent 2 hours with this stupid monitor and the firmware update process they describe doesn't work. I mean, not even from the very start. The steps starting with 5, flip the switch to off, press and hold the 1st button from the right, then flip the switch to on, it simply does not work. I tried it like 10 times.
So it's not just pathetic that to perform a firmware update you have to go into the service menu, when it's a function that most electronic devices have as part of the regular user menu, but also that it's not possible to do.
So after two hours of wasting my time, I put this piece of crap in its box, and took it to the UPS store to send back to Amazon.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from this monitor!!
