Gigabyte 7NNXP: Tech Support and RMA

For your reference, we will repost our support evaluation procedure here:

The way our Tech Support evaluation works is first we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address (es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure we are not getting the staff “on” an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we have had with our motherboard. We then give the manufacturer up to 72 hours to respond over business days and will report not only whether they even responded within the time allotted but also if they were successful in fixing our problems. After publishing the review, if we do eventually receive a response we will go back and amend the review with the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.

The idea here is to encourage manufacturers to improve their technical support as well as provide new criteria to base your motherboard purchasing decisions upon; with motherboards looking more and more alike every day, we have to help separate the boys from the men in as many ways as possible. As usual, we are interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews so please do email us with your comments.

Gigabyte's RMA policy is easy to follow and fairly good for a tier one motherboard maker. They offer a one-to-three year (depending on the model) manufacturer's Limited warranty. If you are experiencing difficulties in warranty service through your dealer, Gigabyte may attempt to resolve this issue. You must provide the following details to process your RMA request: Name, Address, Phone/Fax number, Model/Revision number, Serial number (10 digits), the precise issues you are experiencing, vendor from which you purchased your Gigabyte product from, (include vendor contact info), CPU type and size, and memory module type and size.

Like ASUS, Gigabyte prefers that you deal directly with the vendor from where you purchased the motherboard rather than with them. This is understandable, as the cost of RMAs, facilities, employees, etc. can be prohibitive. Still, we would love it if the tier one manufacturers would adopt similar RMA policies akin to Epox, Albatron or AOpen's policies.

We were pleased to see that Gigabyte's tech support responded within 72 hours; 33 hours to be exact. This is a vast improvement over Gigabyte's past tech support record, and hopefully it will continue. Though Gigabyte's RMA policy is only adequate, in this instance their tech support performance was excellent. We certainly hope this is the start of a trend.

Gigabyte 7NNXP: Stress Testing Performance Test Configuration
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  • Anonymous User - Friday, July 11, 2003 - link

    Is it really important ....
  • Anonymous User - Friday, July 11, 2003 - link

    Please Go back to The OLD way of doing reviews,
    without any flash!

    Even better Make Charts with the numbers instead
    of these unnecessary Printer head killers.

    :(
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, July 10, 2003 - link

    Regardless of the size of Flash itself, it would seem many users prefer not to use it because of Flash advertisements.

    For Christ's sake, it's not like GIFs are huge, and this is just annoying.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link

    I filter all Flash/Shockwave content because of all those annoying overlay ads out there. Please revert back to something that is standards-based like plain HTML or GIF/JPG.

    Thanks.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link

    The ITE chips support ATAPI devices I read, has this been tested?
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link

    The board is a non-runner in my competition since
    it does NOT have HSF mounting holes! I seems as if
    Gigabyte has overlooked the NEED for these holes
    to save time/money on the engineering/production costs, and consquently will suffer poor sales of this part. The socket is arranged in an orientation that would preclude this part being used in a machine that will be transported any
    distance with a most of the effective HSFs on the
    market today. The socket arrangement should have the mounting lugs facing top to bottom to provide
    against the sag of the HSF combination. Installing
    the socket as they have, will result in the need for shimming (hate those things), and even then,
    the mechanical stresses will be the achilles heel
    of many many installations.
    Sorry for the long-winded, but I have developed
    this opinion through extensive use and study of the socket A specified hardware.

    As for the fellow whom was looking for "any-time"
    support contacts for Giga-byte? Hah!! It doesn't exist. Any inquiry I have made to thier support site seems to "get lost" for an always indeterminate time, occasionaly permantly.
    It's a good thing that Giga-byte generally does
    an excellent job producing thier products, (I own
    20 of thier boards so-far) because if the support
    side of thier business governed thier corporate
    health, they would have folded by now.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link

    The size of the Flash download is irrelevant. I don't know about the others, but I choose not to install such dreadful programs because other websites use them for extremely irritating advertisements. It's been a while since I did HTML, but is there a way that you could have the page test for Flash and then display a GIF if no flash is available? Heck, just the numbers in plain text would be fine with me if you don't want to make Flash and GIF charts. Just no loathsome Flash forced on us.
  • Zuni - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link

    Correction its 400k, which on a 56k modem takes a minute.

    http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/downl...
  • Zuni - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link

    Flash is less than a 200k download, dialup can handle that no problem. GIF/PNG are 2-3 times the size of flash graphs. Over 80% of the internet uses flash, so do we at this time.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link

    What's with the Flash charts? I filter all Flash/Shockwave content so I see a big nothing there. Please revert to a standard like GIF or PNG! Thanks.

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