RMA Return Rate info for motherboards article ..seems as though Gigabyte is best

[DaveLembke]

RMA Return Rate info for motherboards article ..seems as though Gigabyte is best at lowest return rate. Never knew anyone tracked this info myself. Found this article on my facebook wall today and found it interesting.

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&depth=2&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-2/cartes-meres.html&usg=ALkJrhj3Zg9gjLzxCK4wbBCKCNlaxZe3Pg


Here is the FB post I saw this from: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646655398681443&set=a.356650374348615.102156.246415092038811&type=1&theater

[patio]

ASUS a close 2nd...
I buy and use both.

[Calum]

Shock as MSI returns are higher than the others .  I'm surprised to see Gigabyte leading Asus by such a large margin, also surprised Asrock follows Asus so closely.  Not encouraging to see Asus' top end board at the top of the returns list though!  Kingston storm ahead by an impressive margin in the memory returns, no surprise there.  Also no surprise that Corsair Vengeance is 3 out of the 5 most returned items.  Surprised MSI's graphics card return rate is so low, also surprised at Sapphire's rate shooting up to enarly 3x last year's, wow!  4 products over a 10% return rate, ouch.  Seems the 7870 on a whole suffers from a high return rate though judging by their figures.  SSDs - again, no surprise that OCZ leads the way with massively high returns, still rising year on year and with over a 50% return rate on one model.  Absolute joke of a company.  Corsair's previous reliance on Sandforce seems to show in their increase return rate, Crucial holding steady as I'd expect, and Samsung way ahead of the rest, be interesting to see what happens once the 840 series has been out in the wild for a good while.

I like seeing the regular articles from hardware.fr on return rates, it's very useful info although of course it takes a while for the stats to catch up with the newest hardware.  Most, if not all, retailers will collect this info, though few make it public.  I knew the return rates on common items (mainly OCZ products) while I was at one of my previous jobs, and could always ask a former colleague for them if I was curious, but again they wouldn't be made public knowledge for fear of putting people off products.

Thanks for posting, I hadn't seen this latest one

[DaveLembke]

Hey Calum glad I was able to link something you havent seen yet.

And in regards to knowing failure rates or potential for problems, I generally research before buying hardware and I am never one of the first to own anything that is cutting edge. I generally buy computer hardware etc after its been out for a few months or years minimum to let others be the test subjects and report their problems and RMA claims on newegg and other sites that have good feedback listings to examine before clicking BUY as well as buying these items without the crazy premium price tags with buying cutting edge parts. I am more of a value shopper buying on discounts that are too good to pass up etc.

I dont always check feedback though on inexpensive items and if I had I would have probably avoided a few purchases. One example recently was with a Rosewill mATX computer case without PSU that was marked down from $25 to $15 with free shipping at newegg. I had an older Pentium 4 build that I wanted to bring back to life and didnt have an empty case to put the hardware in that was in ESD baggies etc paired up with 60GB hard drive that was a matched OS activation from the prior build. I basically gutted this computer 2 years prior for its case for a newer build and saved the hardware off to the side to rebuild this system quickly some day. So I just needed to stuff all the guts into a case and turn it on. So for $15 I said its just a case nothing can go wrong with it and bought it without looking at feedback etc.

I got the case later that week and everytime I get a box in the mail it feels like christmas, I have to dig right into it and work on the project right then and there. I lifted up the cardboard box and heard stuff rattling inside but didnt think anything of it since its a cheap case and the baggy of screws probably opened up in shipping. I opened the box and reached in to pull out the Rosewill brand mATX case and the front plastic faceplate was disconnected. Thought to myself no problem just need to snap it back in. Went to snap it back in and found out that 5 of 6 locking tab snaps were snapped completely off. So this case arrived damaged. The rattling noise I heard was the pieces of broken plastic  floating around in the case, the baggy of screws were still sealed inside.

I figured that its not worth sending the case back RMA, so since the case was black with black plastic, I'd use electrical tape and while holding the cover/face onto the tower chasis with the side panel off, I wrapped electrical tape around the case at its seam between the metal chasis and the black plastic faceplate. Electrical tape was just as good as duct tape, but didnt stand out. So I built this system back up with the guts I had and using this cheap case with band-aid due to shipping damages.

I went to leave feedback on newegg with 3 eggs/stars, and to my surprise there were like 60 other people complaining about the same problem with tabs busted in shipping. Looking at the dates on the feedback I realized that had I looked at the feedback prior to purchase I could have avoided buying a broken cheap case that needed to be fixed on delivery.

[camerongray]

Very interesting, glad Calum had already warned me about MSI!  Would be interesting to see the rates on lower end boards like Biostar, they could either fail more since they are cheaper or fail less since they aren't as likely to be pushed hard through overclocking.etc like the higher end boards.

[Calum]

Yeah, customer reviews on retailers sites can be good for that sort of thing, they should always be taken with a pinch of salt but for that kind of issue they're very handy.
I always do my research and I'm lucky in that most of my friends still work at a major retailer, so I can always ask what the return rate is like, what kind of issues they get with a certain product, and so on.

Cameron - you're probably unlikely to see Biostar, ECS, and similar manufacturers on the list as the volume sold is much less than the ones in the article so there's not enough data to draw meaningful conclusions from.  It would be interesting if some more retailers were to join in and pool their findings, perhaps a UK based study would be interesting reading too.  As you say though, for some components the return rate will depend on other factors, the target audience being a major one.

[patio]

I have never seen an MSI MBoard that did not have issues...