Powercolor Radeon 7870 Myst RMA Woes

Status
Not open for further replies.
N

NobleX13

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 15, 2010
Messages
4,126
My PowerColor Radeon HD 7870 Myst Edition recently started artifacting so I RMA'd it.

Three weeks later I receive the following email claiming that I "damaged the fan" and that it would cost $40 to replace it.

I am the original owner of this card and have babied it since I bought it. I know for a fact that the fan was in perfect working order when I shipped it to PowerColor.

TLDR:

Has anyone else had issues with PowerColor RMA, and do we have a rep here who can assist me?

Hello NobleX13,

Due to the damage to the fan itself, we cannot honor the warranty. However, if you pay a fee of 40 dollar for the cost of the fan, we can give you a different working card.

Best Regards,

Raymond
Click to expand...
 
You may be out of luck. I have that same card. When I bought it and tried to submit the rebate, Powercolor weaseled their way out of paying the rebate by claiming I submitted the wrong rebate form. I sent in the photocopies I made of the form before I mailed it. They waited weeks until the rebate expired to claim it wouldn't honor the rebate as it got submitted too late.

The card itself has been nice but I will never buy anything from Power Olof again due to how underhanded they conduct themselves.
 
There must have been a management change or some sort of change, their used to be an active Powercolor Rep on various boards, and offered pretty amazing support for a budget brand. He had rebates handled.
 
I RMA'd my card about 25 days ago. I waited to hear from them. Nothing, So a week and a half ago, I emailed RMA support, and 5 days later got a response. "Cards okay. Want to send back or wait for replacement?" My card has been artifacting like crazy and random screen flickers, none of which exist when running these 4890's, so I said I'll take the replacement. A week goes by, nothing on if it's going to be replaced or not. I emailed them back, and I was told, "Sorry, must have been sent to spam. What is your response." Frustrated at this point. 3 weeks +, no care into telling me what's going on, after their email states that it'll take up to 14 days to complete the RMA process, and my e-mail goes to spam. I told him I would like a replacement. Three days later, "Okay, I will process the replacement and we will ship it soon."

Still no Fed-Ex, USPS, UPS tracking info. It's handled by one guy, and don't bother calling the number on there. I called both contact phone numbers and it seems to go to some guys phone line, who h as no room on voicemail.
 
Dang, that's really disappointing, $40 for a damaged fan seems very petty and unrelated to the issue of a faulty card. I was sort of hoping my good experience with Powercolor late last year (in so far as an RMA experience CAN be good...) was the norm and now I'm seeing negative reports left and right about the company. Perhaps the mining craze has affected Powercolor's attitude towards consumers.

First off: my suggestion would be to try to call them. They aren't as big a company as it seems like they should be and you may be able to get through to someone who can solve this without much trouble.

Sorry if this post gets too long, I am not good at being succinct.

My exp: I bought a 7950 VE5 a little before script mining blew up for like $190 from Newegg. I called Powercolor on the phone after about a month to check on the MIR form and spoke to a woman who claimed to be personally handling the rebates. She told me my rebate had been approved but that she wouldn't get around to processing the checks for my "stack" for a couple weeks. The 20 dollar rebate did come in about the time she said it would in the form of a check from TUL (Powercolor parent corporation). The weirdest thing about the call was that the first person answered the phone "Hello?" That's probably not a good sign. Thought I had the number wrong but they confirmed I had reached Powercolor...

About 3 weeks after I sold the card, the buyer contacted me to let me know it had died with no apparent damage. I offered to refund the guy... but script mining was in full blown fever by then and the card was worth twice what I sold it for so he obviously was hoping for help with an RMA and to get the card back. I had immediately registered the card when I got it because you had to for the rebate. So I filled out the RMA forms and sent him the RMA info when it came through. He sent it off to PC and they had a replacement card back to me in about 2 weeks. I cried a little inside at how bad I am with money and sent it back to him, feeling as though Powercolor had taken really good care of us. Maybe we just got super lucky to get this through the gauntlet just before mining got completely batshit crazy.
 
Wow that seems shady. I'm glad I opted to purchase an XFX card instead of PowerColor. Funny enough, the deciding factor was me finding out that PowerColor doesn't use a reference design on their 7870 when XFX did.
 
That's terrible customer support. The only thing that makes sense is if the fan was damaged during shipping but based on what you said I'm assuming you packaged it properly before shipping it out.

It sounds like they'll do almost anything to get out of replacing items under warranty. If that doesn't work, they claim "x" was broken and (if I had to guess) the $40 they charge you is to cover their cost in replacing the card.
 
Reading this experience I'm glad gut instinct told me to pass up on PowerColor when buying a new GPU.
 
I had several powercolor 7950s that worked well.. When I sold them, one of the buyers messed his up by overclocking, and I helped him RMA it.. they turned the RMA around in about 7 days after receipt, and even sent an upgraded card.

Isolated experience, but their RMA was good when I needed it for a card I sold.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top