I recently had an RMA experience that I thought was worth getting up on my soap box to share.
I don't post much around here, but have been an on-again off-again PC enthusiast/gamer for quite some time. I will usually troll the Hot Deals forum here over morning coffee. Times have been tight lately, but I couldn't resist a $200 980TI refurb when this showed up in the Hot Deals almost 2 months ago: https://hardforum.com/threads/evga-wedsday-special-1080sc-400.1969014/#post-1043864404
https://hardforum.com/threads/evga-wedsday-special-1080sc-400.1969014/#post-1043864404
Ordering from the site was a bit chaotic that morning, as orders were not being accepted (see the thread above) but by luck and lots of retries, I secured a 980TI which showed up about a week later. Using Heaven as a benchmark, the card was about 33% faster than the 980 it replaced, so a nice bump and still compatible with XP (important to me for reasons I won't go into here).
As is typical with a new card for me, I put it in a benching loop to make sure of stability and left this thing run for 2 days without issue. Tried it in a few games and started getting video driver crashes. Tried different drivers and no joy. Tried putting my old 980 back in and the crashes stopped - oh crap. Put the 980TI back in and ran the Heaven loop with VSYNC enabled, because that is the mode I was using in the crashed games. In 10-30 minutes, Heaven would crash the driver. Put the 980 back in and it ran for days without issue. The 980TI was failing when the driver downclocked under light load. Oh joy!, RMA time.
I called tech support at EVGA and got a human very quickly. Explained what I was seeing and he setup a cross ship RMA. I was just past the 30 day cutoff for free return shipping by my order date, but was within 30 days of my delivery date and my rep got the company to send a paid return shipping label. The rep not only was technically competent, but knew the company procedures and what would happen. This played out exactly as he said except for one thing...
The new card showed up and I was about to install it. Before breaking the seal, I checked the P/N and it was wrong. Another oh crap moment. Looked it up and found they had sent me a 1070TI - a 1070TI for $200. I'm really surprised they did this as b-stock 980TIs exactly like the one I bought were in stock at the time.
The 1070TI is not XP compatible, but it blew the 980TI out of the water in terms of performance. Nearly 11% faster than the 980TI and 46% faster than the 980 all while drawing about 100W less power than the 980TI. Upon doing a bit more research, found the 1070TI is a lot closer to a 1080 than 1070. I'll live w/o the XP compatibly.
I've been buying EVGA video cards going back to the 7800GT, this is the first one I've had fail and my first experience with their RMA. I know they have made some mistakes that I've seen commented here, but in this world of poor customer service and RMA runarounds being typical, I thought it was worth sharing.
That said, I did have an ATI 9800 Pro die just before the end of its 3 year warranty and ATI replaced it without hassle too. That was a long time ago, man I'm getting old.
-Mike
I don't post much around here, but have been an on-again off-again PC enthusiast/gamer for quite some time. I will usually troll the Hot Deals forum here over morning coffee. Times have been tight lately, but I couldn't resist a $200 980TI refurb when this showed up in the Hot Deals almost 2 months ago: https://hardforum.com/threads/evga-wedsday-special-1080sc-400.1969014/#post-1043864404
https://hardforum.com/threads/evga-wedsday-special-1080sc-400.1969014/#post-1043864404
Ordering from the site was a bit chaotic that morning, as orders were not being accepted (see the thread above) but by luck and lots of retries, I secured a 980TI which showed up about a week later. Using Heaven as a benchmark, the card was about 33% faster than the 980 it replaced, so a nice bump and still compatible with XP (important to me for reasons I won't go into here).
As is typical with a new card for me, I put it in a benching loop to make sure of stability and left this thing run for 2 days without issue. Tried it in a few games and started getting video driver crashes. Tried different drivers and no joy. Tried putting my old 980 back in and the crashes stopped - oh crap. Put the 980TI back in and ran the Heaven loop with VSYNC enabled, because that is the mode I was using in the crashed games. In 10-30 minutes, Heaven would crash the driver. Put the 980 back in and it ran for days without issue. The 980TI was failing when the driver downclocked under light load. Oh joy!, RMA time.
I called tech support at EVGA and got a human very quickly. Explained what I was seeing and he setup a cross ship RMA. I was just past the 30 day cutoff for free return shipping by my order date, but was within 30 days of my delivery date and my rep got the company to send a paid return shipping label. The rep not only was technically competent, but knew the company procedures and what would happen. This played out exactly as he said except for one thing...
The new card showed up and I was about to install it. Before breaking the seal, I checked the P/N and it was wrong. Another oh crap moment. Looked it up and found they had sent me a 1070TI - a 1070TI for $200. I'm really surprised they did this as b-stock 980TIs exactly like the one I bought were in stock at the time.
The 1070TI is not XP compatible, but it blew the 980TI out of the water in terms of performance. Nearly 11% faster than the 980TI and 46% faster than the 980 all while drawing about 100W less power than the 980TI. Upon doing a bit more research, found the 1070TI is a lot closer to a 1080 than 1070. I'll live w/o the XP compatibly.
I've been buying EVGA video cards going back to the 7800GT, this is the first one I've had fail and my first experience with their RMA. I know they have made some mistakes that I've seen commented here, but in this world of poor customer service and RMA runarounds being typical, I thought it was worth sharing.
That said, I did have an ATI 9800 Pro die just before the end of its 3 year warranty and ATI replaced it without hassle too. That was a long time ago, man I'm getting old.
-Mike