So, am I the only one that AMD treats like a criminal when requesting an RMA?

jordan12 said:
...
I threw it away and ripped myself a new one for being an idiot and bought a new CPU.
Click to expand...
i do not understand why people throw away stuff that is worth so much money, i just seen a post on a forum where a guy binned a complete b450 system because of an upgrade. i guess most people treat this world as disposable, me, i have been using the same plastic disposable spoon all week.
 
Zedicus said:
i do not understand why people throw away stuff that is worth so much money, i just seen a post on a forum where a guy binned a complete b450 system because of an upgrade. i guess most people treat this world as disposable, me, i have been using the same plastic disposable spoon all week.
Click to expand...
it is because I am the one who destroyed it. It could not be fixed because of my idiocy. Nothing else to do.
But I felt sick for several days.
 
jordan12 said:
I broke my 3950X CPU because when I removed the HSF, for some reason, the CPU came out with it!! I actually had 2 pins that literally popped out. Sigh. I had it all of 3 months.

I threw it away and ripped myself a new one for being an idiot and bought a new CPU.
Click to expand...
Twist and lift 🙂
 
Seems like the person working the RMA wants to do a thorough job or just a pain. I have pulled the CPU out with the heatsink quite a few times with all sorts of AM2, AM3, AM4 and FM2 CPU's. I even had it happen when twisting. I helped someone straighten pins after the CPU fell to the floor and he stepped on it. I used the mechanic pencil trick for that one. Just too bad my job does not have a good reflow station and solder vacuum. Wicking does not work with plated through holes. I have a nice Z490 motherboard I would like to replace the USB 3.0 header on.
 
StormNobleheart said:
Seems like the person working the RMA wants to do a thorough job or just a pain. I have pulled the CPU out with the heatsink quite a few times with all sorts of AM2, AM3, AM4 and FM2 CPU's. I even had it happen when twisting. I helped someone straighten pins after the CPU fell to the floor and he stepped on it. I used the mechanic pencil trick for that one. Just too bad my job does not have a good reflow station and solder vacuum. Wicking does not work with plated through holes. I have a nice Z490 motherboard I would like to replace the USB 3.0 header on.
Click to expand...
You managed to fix the pins on a CPU that was stepped on? I would not have patience to do something like that.
Zedicus said:
i do not understand why people throw away stuff that is worth so much money, i just seen a post on a forum where a guy binned a complete b450 system because of an upgrade. i guess most people treat this world as disposable, me, i have been using the same plastic disposable spoon all week.
Click to expand...
It wasn't functional tho. He could of thrown it on Ebay and got something for it at least.
 
Last edited:
vegeta535 said:
You managed to fix the pins on a CPU that was stepped on? I would not have patience to do something like that.
Click to expand...
It was also back in the Pentium 3 or 4 days.

I repaired a Ryzen 3600 recently using my phone as a magnifying glass so I could straighten a few pins and remove the FOD.
 
I recently had to rma a ddc pump with EK. The thing somehow leaked water when it wasn't even on. Water would flow right through it. Great thing to find when you've finished building your loop. When I got it from EK new, it didn't even come in retail packaging, just wrapped in bubble wrap. Luckily, I had an older weaker model to use in the meantime. I had to provide them with pictures from different angles along with a video of the water leaking out. I put some tube on the end of the standard pump top and filled it with distilled water and filmed it leaking out the area where the power cables leave the back. It took about three days of back and forth to get it done. Then, they sent me a replacement pump, but not the top, just the inner body, and they send the 3.2 version that they don't even sell anymore. I was hoping they would have replaced it with their current 4.2 version with SATA power, but they didn't.

Moral of the story, just don't give up.
 
kamikazi said:
I recently had to rma a ddc pump with EK. The thing somehow leaked water when it wasn't even on. Water would flow right through it. Great thing to find when you've finished building your loop. When I got it from EK new, it didn't even come in retail packaging, just wrapped in bubble wrap. Luckily, I had an older weaker model to use in the meantime. I had to provide them with pictures from different angles along with a video of the water leaking out. I put some tube on the end of the standard pump top and filled it with distilled water and filmed it leaking out the area where the power cables leave the back. It took about three days of back and forth to get it done. Then, they sent me a replacement pump, but not the top, just the inner body, and they send the 3.2 version that they don't even sell anymore. I was hoping they would have replaced it with their current 4.2 version with SATA power, but they didn't.

Moral of the story, just don't give up.
Click to expand...
I hate EK RMA. I had to provide videos to performance PC for them to be able to warranty it. EK wants proof even from vendors before they send them replacements. The replacement was BNiB at least.
 
Ok so update, after a week of back and forth and sending numerous pictures, I even put the rig back together with the pizza box method and took pictures of the BIOS then got no response from them for several days. Finally I sent another email and just straight up asked if they would honor the warranty or am I going to have to stop buying AMD products and like magic my RMA was approved about 15 minutes later 🤷‍♂️
 
Old thread but I just went through this. What is interesting to me it's the inconsistency.

I had a 5950x that had a terrible time with ram (nothing would work higher than 3000, nothing). I would have never known but on a different build later, ram did the docp timings at 3200 without fussing (3600x proc). That led me to experiment and isolate the processor.

Anyway, grabbed a 3900x to sub in here, and submitted rma request. Had to detail motherboards and ram that I tried and bios, of which I had tried 9 combinations at that point. They required the receipt, a good pic of the processor mounted in the motherboard, and then another with the rma number written and visible. It was odd for sure, and response times were 25 minutes for me, 3 days for them.

One approved, super fast replacement, about 7 days from my house and new one shipped.

Unfortunately I've been impressed with the 3900x. Now I have a nib 5950x that I may just sell.
 
pvtgoose said:
Old thread but I just went through this. What is interesting to me it's the inconsistency.

I had a 5950x that had a terrible time with ram (nothing would work higher than 3000, nothing). I would have never known but on a different build later, ram did the docp timings at 3200 without fussing (3600x proc). That led me to experiment and isolate the processor.

Anyway, grabbed a 3900x to sub in here, and submitted rma request. Had to detail motherboards and ram that I tried and bios, of which I had tried 9 combinations at that point. They required the receipt, a good pic of the processor mounted in the motherboard, and then another with the rma number written and visible. It was odd for sure, and response times were 25 minutes for me, 3 days for them.

One approved, super fast replacement, about 7 days from my house and new one shipped.

Unfortunately I've been impressed with the 3900x. Now I have a nib 5950x that I may just sell.
Click to expand...

I think the 5950X is significantly faster. I've RMA'd with AMD back in the FX chip days and they just asked for a receipt and I had a new one in a few days. I'm pretty sure this is a response to mining RMA overload, but it was very annoying.
 
Just not 100% convinced that the car that does 0-60 in 3 seconds is really that much faster than the one that does it in 4. It's a lot in a benchmark but 4 seconds is really fast.
 
The difference is when that car needs to go 1000 miles and doing it in 10 hours is way better than doing it in 24.

But, that's coming from someone who has his 3900X at 100% load probably a good 1/10th of the year. Different workloads for different jobs.
 
OFaceSIG said:
It does seem a bit "inquisitiony" for them to ask for that much. That being said, CPUs rarely fail. It happens, but I've seen maybe two CPUs fail in my entire life, and that was in server environments, never in my personal life. I've been in PCs since 1989 and in datacenters since 2007. So I can see their disbelief and desire for proof.

That being said, I would give them what they want and *IF* they continue to be a hassle, all you can do is let the community know.
Click to expand...

Not buying it. It's been well documented that the first batch of 5950xs had a fuckload of defective CPUs in it. I think it's a fallacy, honestly. 30 years ago someone said "CPUs rarely fail," and so it just gets repeated, but I don't see any facts to back that up. The thing that's interesting is just how many PC users live with unstable PCs. "Oh yeah. My computer reboots every once in a while." I bet there's FAR more defective hardware shipping than people are aware of just because the marketing machine behind all this crap would rather talk about literally anything else.
 
bigbluefe said:
It's just bad engineering. The AM4 socket is fucking crap. The lever on it is so flimsy and weak. Intel sockets have always been better.
Click to expand...

I don't think "better" when I think of a retention mechanism bending the IHS. I've never had a problem with AM4 sockets.
 
kirbyrj said:
I don't think "better" when I think of a retention mechanism bending the IHS. I've never had a problem with AM4 sockets.
Click to expand...

A good design should be pretty braindead and idiot proof. Shouldn't require specific movements in specific orders.

CPU packaging in general blows with the error prone pins and other stupid shit. There's got to be a better way.
 
bigbluefe said:
A good design should be pretty braindead and idiot proof. Shouldn't require specific movements in specific orders.

CPU packaging in general blows with the error prone pins and other stupid shit. There's got to be a better way.
Click to expand...

It seems like every manufacturer is caught up in having the retention connected to the motherboard. I don't see why you couldn't have a screw down mechanism (ala the Alder lake "fix" contact frame) for Intel and AMD motherboards. Two piece retention wouldn't bother me at all and would probably save many a motherboard and/or CPU.
 
bigbluefe said:
It's just bad engineering. The AM4 socket is fucking crap. The lever on it is so flimsy and weak. Intel sockets have always been better.
Click to expand...
I'm generally OK with not idiot proofing everything. If you don't know what you're doing, rtfm.
 
I kind of miss the CPU's that were the card format. Although it's pretty much impossible to give those proper cooling with the ATX spec.
 
NightReaver said:
Put cpu in socket, flip lever down. Don't touch pins. Man, hard stuff right there.
Click to expand...
the complaint was how flimsy they are if you just try to yank straight up on the HSF after the TIM has hardened. You gotta twist and lift. Its in the manual.
 
travm said:
the complaint was how flimsy they are if you just try to yank straight up on the HSF after the TIM has hardened. You gotta twist and lift. Its in the manual.
Click to expand...
Apparently just asking people to read a manual is too much lol.
 
NightReaver said:
Apparently just asking people to read a manual is too much lol.
Click to expand...
travm said:
the complaint was how flimsy they are if you just try to yank straight up on the HSF after the TIM has hardened. You gotta twist and lift. Its in the manual.
Click to expand...

I actually think it's more insidious than that. I wouldn't put it past companies like Intel and AMD to intentionally design it that way so they have an out when it comes to RMAs. "Oops, you pulled out the pins of the CPU when taking it out to RMA it. Sorry, you're fucked. Thanks for the money, btw."

They are that evil when designing shit and making decisions.
 
travm said:
the complaint was how flimsy they are if you just try to yank straight up on the HSF after the TIM has hardened. You gotta twist and lift. Its in the manual.
Click to expand...

It can not clamp down harder on the pins, they are too thin to do that without damaging them. Plus Ive seen almost every cpu with pins pulled out of the socket by the heatsink, it isnt just an AM4 problem, just more common.
 
bigbluefe said:
Not buying it. It's been well documented that the first batch of 5950xs had a fuckload of defective CPUs in it. I think it's a fallacy, honestly. 30 years ago someone said "CPUs rarely fail," and so it just gets repeated, but I don't see any facts to back that up. The thing that's interesting is just how many PC users live with unstable PCs. "Oh yeah. My computer reboots every once in a while." I bet there's FAR more defective hardware shipping than people are aware of just because the marketing machine behind all this crap would rather talk about literally anything else.
Click to expand...

bigbluefe said:
I actually think it's more insidious than that. I wouldn't put it past companies like Intel and AMD to intentionally design it that way so they have an out when it comes to RMAs. "Oops, you pulled out the pins of the CPU when taking it out to RMA it. Sorry, you're fucked. Thanks for the money, btw."

They are that evil when designing shit and making decisions.
Click to expand...

I didn't see the paranoia until I read your second quote. Have you taken business courses or industrial engineering course? Have you see what Intel's validation lab looks like?

*NO* company wants to deal with warranty claims. Ask Mazda in the 90s about warranty claims and their turbo rotaries. Companies want to put out product that well exceeds the warranty period.

Are there CPUs that fail? Of course. But it is rare, as I stated before. I will give you that recent Ryzens statically, seem to be failing more than previous generations. But numerically it's still a tiny percentage compared to chips that have actually been shipped.

But to go as far as to say that these companies design product, or products that work with their products, like the socket, on purpose to fail is a bit much. Planned obsolescence is different than planned fragility.
 
Starfalcon said:
It can not clamp down harder on the pins, they are too thin to do that without damaging them. Plus Ive seen almost every cpu with pins pulled out of the socket by the heatsink, it isnt just an AM4 problem, just more common.
Click to expand...
more common because AM4 CPU's have actual pins. The clamping mechanism is different. The clamps on intel boards wouldnt hold an am4 cpu, and vice versa. I'm just sayin - twist and lift.
 
travm said:
more common because AM4 CPU's have actual pins. The clamping mechanism is different. The clamps on intel boards wouldnt hold an am4 cpu, and vice versa. I'm just sayin - twist and lift.
Click to expand...
What sort of garbage paste are people using that this is even a problem? Any decent paste out there i've seen stays goopy for years. If it's a build where you're swapping CPU's every couple of years the paste should never be getting that solid. If it's a build where you never swap the CPU.. Why are we even having this discussion?
 
Mchart said:
What sort of garbage paste are people using that this is even a problem? Any decent paste out there i've seen stays goopy for years. If it's a build where you're swapping CPU's every couple of years the paste should never be getting that solid. If it's a build where you never swap the CPU.. Why are we even having this discussion?
Click to expand...
I generally repaste every 3-5 years. Arctic silver, that MX-4 crap, they all harden up in that time. Best way is to turn it on, get it warmed up, turn it off, then twist and lift. thats all i'm saying. Its a non-problem.
 
bigbluefe said:
Not buying it. It's been well documented that the first batch of 5950xs had a fuckload of defective CPUs in it. I think it's a fallacy, honestly. 30 years ago someone said "CPUs rarely fail," and so it just gets repeated, but I don't see any facts to back that up. The thing that's interesting is just how many PC users live with unstable PCs. "Oh yeah. My computer reboots every once in a while." I bet there's FAR more defective hardware shipping than people are aware of just because the marketing machine behind all this crap would rather talk about literally anything else.
Click to expand...

There is a significant number of 6-core chips from both the 3xxx and 5xxx lines that lose memory channels too. Like, it happens so much I'm surprised it isn't talked about more. Not saying intel doesn't have problems, the first CPU I ever had go bad was an intel. A Xeon at that. It was an 8-core LGA2011 chip on a dual socket board that I ran for Folding and it just crapped out one day. It was under a year old so I got a new one fast but I was surprised a workstation chip like that up and died with no warning.
 
I think a lot of the whea issues people have are more to do with overclocking and pbo curve offset, or just not testing their memory overclock properly then actual bad cpu's. Now bad motherboards or memory I have seen far more often then an actual bad cpu.
 
Gideon said:
I think a lot of the whea issues people have are more to do with overclocking and pbo curve offset, or just not testing their memory overclock properly then actual bad cpu's. Now bad motherboards or memory I have seen far more often then an actual bad cpu.
Click to expand...

A buddy of mine got two bad 5900X's, one of them just stopped working, after RMA the other would throw periodic whea errors. After TONS (and I mean tons) of troubleshooting because he couldn't believe he got two bad cpu's, it was determined to be the 5900X as he tried a different cpu and had zero errors.

I've been running a pbo/co 5950X since december of '20 without issue...PC is on 24/7 and does periodic 100%cpu/gpu loads doing photogrammetry (to the point it's tripped overload on my UPS a few times). All 4 ram slots loaded and usb system heavily utilized (for VR and peripherals, generally has 8-10 peripherals active), all the problem areas for am4 and no issues. So could just be luck of the draw, who knows. I plan to swtich to 5800x3d as my 5950X sometimes chugs in iRacing on cpu intensive tracks and the x3d has shown 40%+ uplift in that game in cpu limited scenerios as it's heavily single thread, and in particular, geometry dependent. I play that more than I do productivity, but I kind of don't want to touch the system for fear of messing up what has been a dead on fully reliable setup.
 
Last edited:
bobzdar said:
A buddy of mine got two bad 5900X's, one of them just stopped working, after RMA the other would throw periodic whea errors. After TONS (and I mean tons) of troubleshooting because he couldn't believe he got two bad cpu's, it was determined to be the 5900X as he tried a different cpu and had zero errors.

I've been running a pbo/co 5950X since december of '20 without issue...PC is on 24/7 and does periodic 100%cpu/gpu loads doing photogrammetry (to the point it's tripped overload on my UPS a few times). All 4 ram slots loaded and usb system heavily utilized (for VR and peripherals, generally has 8-10 peripherals active), all the problem areas for am4 and no issues. So could just be luck of the draw, who knows. I plan to swtich to 5800x3d as my 5950X sometimes chugs in iRacing on cpu intensive tracks and the x3d has shown 40%+ uplift in that game in cpu limited scenerios as it's heavily single thread, and in particular, geometry dependent. I play that more than I do productivity, but I kind of don't want to touch the system for fear of messing up what has been a dead on fully reliable setup.
Click to expand...

A bad cpu is not impossible but two in a row seems very odd, but sometimes you win the lottery.

If it's just 1 game it has a issue with have you tried turning SMT off and seeing if that helps? Some games respond better with it off. Otherwise you might just look into building yourself a dedicated rig just for iRacing, it is a cool simulator since they actually scan the tracks they put into the game.
 
My one and only experience with AMD's RMA service was back when my Athlon Thunderbird 1.33GHz CPU fried. AMD claimed I had abused it which was far from the case. It simply smoked the first time I powered on the system on a brand new motherboard. I had another CPU that worked on the board, so it wasn't the board or a lack of a proper thermal solution. In any case, AMD charged me $50 to replace the CPU. While unfair, I didn't complain too much given the cost of those CPU's at the time.
 
LigTasm said:
I've been buying Ryzen chips since they came out and recommending them to everyone. I've probably put together 30 different machines with them by now.

But trying to RMA my 5800X that has constant WHEA errors unless I shut all the C-states off, disable PBO and CPB, and change it to PCI-E 3.0 is like pulling teeth. They wanted the original receipt and a picture of the IHS, ok. Then they wanted a picture of the IHS with a hand written paper next to it with my case number....ok. Now they want pictures of every angle of the PC, inside and out, the cables, screenshots of every BIOS page, screenshots of the errors, windows logs, etc. The rig has already been disassembled BECAUSE IT DOESNT WORK.

Is this supposed to be normal? Even worse, I paid double retail price for this chip at the height of the covid/mining craze so they got their goddamn money from me. This is really looking like the last time I buy anything from AMD, I get the sneaking suspicion if I send the chip in they'll just pull a newegg and smash the pins so they can blame me for damage.
Click to expand...
not quite same situation but i returned a damaged 5900x from newegg that looks as though it had been run over didnt accept it took photos day it was received told them i cant accept it in this condition it goes back. then any any order i made after that got cancelled automatically and later on my account was deactivated.
 
OFaceSIG said:
It does seem a bit "inquisitiony" for them to ask for that much. That being said, CPUs rarely fail. It happens, but I've seen maybe two CPUs fail in my entire life, and that was in server environments, never in my personal life. I've been in PCs since 1989 and in datacenters since 2007. So I can see their disbelief and desire for proof.

That being said, I would give them what they want and *IF* they continue to be a hassle, all you can do is let the community know.
Click to expand...
I had an Intel cpu fail. It had an intermittent bad math processor. I was extremely lucky how it was caught. But, a phone call to Intel, literally 2 minutes talking with a tech establishing my bona fides and describing the test failure, and they cross-shipped me a new processor. Had it within a day or two...on a 5 (?) year old cpu.

I was stunned that I had a bad cpu...but I did. So, it is very rare, but it does happen.
 
c3k said:
I had an Intel cpu fail. It had an intermittent bad math processor. I was extremely lucky how it was caught. But, a phone call to Intel, literally 2 minutes talking with a tech establishing my bona fides and describing the test failure, and they cross-shipped me a new processor. Had it within a day or two...on a 5 (?) year old cpu.

I was stunned that I had a bad cpu...but I did. So, it is very rare, but it does happen.
Click to expand...
That's incredible customer service. Good to hear from Intel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top