u/playboicart1

Bought a US$2,200 ROG Zephyrus G16 (GU605CR, RTX 5070 Ti) from Best Buy in November 2025. It has been unstable almost from literally the start.

1. WHEA fatal hardware errors and crash storms by March and since June a fault I can legit prove from firmwarelevel logs: the RTC/standby power well intermittently loses power while the machine is OFF.
2. Kernel-Boot Event 238 shows the firmware reading the RTC as 2025-11-20 (the BIOS build date) on 10 boots so far, each with a 45-47 second UEFI phase (vs ~7s normal) because the board has to fully retrain its soldered LPDDR5X after losing state.
3. ACPI BERT records (WHEA Event 1, NOTIFY_BOOT + PREVERR) with Fatal SoC Firmware Error sections appear on those boots - generated by the platform before Windows even loads. In August it escalated to full no-power events: no LEDs, no fans, nothing, until a 40-second EC reset.
4. It now fails after effectively every shutdown. I work off this machine and it is failing more every week - 2 RTC-loss events in June, 6 in the first 11 days of August.

I'm in Singapore for work on a consulting project for the year and cant return to the US for a while.

- ASUS's own SG portal shows my registered serial with warranty valid until end of this year and a green check and clearly there is no geographic caveat shown anywhere.

- The SG service centre (R-Logic) quoted me a PAID repair and didnt even try to understand the travel situation - kept rambling on about the same "device In Local(USA) Warranty but it is a nonLocal Device" seriously?

- The reason, which I only found by digging through ASUS's coveragelist docs - "units purchased from Best Buy do not qualify for international warranty." This appears NOWHERE at purchase, nowhere in my box, and nowhere on the warranty portal.

ASUS even answers on Best Buy Q&As that these units are local-only - but no customer sees that unless they know to ask. Seems a bit predatory?

- Cherry on top: ASUS Premium Care is also "not compatible with... products purchased from Best Buy" per ASUS's own T&C. So I can't even PAY ASUS to extend or upgrade coverage on this thing.

So: a 9-month-old flagship with a documented board-level defect that started inside the first months of ownership, an active warranty ASUS's systems acknowledge until 18 Dec 2026, and no way to use it where I physically am - because of a retailer-channel footnote no buyer is ever shown.

I've filed a formal request with ASUS SG for a one-time international warranty accommodation.

If anyone from ASUS is here: this is exactly the kind of case your post-2024 RMA reform was supposed to fix. Pick it up.

If anyone has successfully gotten ASUS to honor cross-region service on a Best Buy-channel unit, I'd genuinely like to hear how.

And if you're buying a ROG laptop in the US: do not buy it from Best Buy if there is any chance you'll ever leave the country with it. I found this out 9 months in.

Shouldve got a Macbook Pro ffs.