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Albatron Tech Support and RMA

For those of you that aren't already aware of the fact, Albatron is a fairly new name in the motherboard market. Even though Albatron was only born 6 months ago, its experience runs deeper than that; as you may or may not know, Albatron was created by former Gigabyte employees.

Even though Albatron is a new name in this market, they've clearly got some experience and knowledge backing them. And this brings us to Albatron's Technical Support, which was amazingly responsive. We first introduced our Tech Support & RMA test methodology in our last motherboard review, but here's a quick refresher anyway:

The way it 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're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've 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. If we do eventually receive a response after the review is published, 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're interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews so please do email us with your comments.

Due to time constraints, we were unable to give motherboard manufacturers the usual 72 hours to respond to our tech support emails for this particular review. So for this shootout, we were only able to allot 24 hours for a response, and thus didn't penalize those manufacturers that didn't respond within this limited timeframe. However, in the event that we did get a response within 24 hours, we would obviously note it with praise.

So, from three different email addresses, we asked three different questions about a type of hardware "problem" that was plaguing us. Albatron passed the tech support tests with flying colors. Albatron replied to all three emails within two hours, and was helpful in all cases. This is quite unusual even for the best tech support staff out there. Is this the norm at Albatron? We're not sure, but we think our results speak for themselves.

In case you're interested, the email address we sent our questions to at Albatron was dr.pro@albatron.com.tw. If you have an Albatron board and it's giving you trouble, you want to shoot off an email to Dr. Pro at Albatron tech support.

Albatron's RMA process is fairly simple and straight forward. To RMA an Albatron motherboard, all you have to do is visit this link (http://www.albatronusa.com/rma_repair.html) and fill out your:

1. Purchase date and Invoice number.
2. Contact Information.
3. A brief explanation of your reason for RMA.
4. Your Operating System.
5. Product Model.
And
6. Serial Number(s).

Albatron also leaves a very clearly marked email address at the bottom of page (rma@albatronusa.com) along with a phone number you can contact them at in the U.S. (1-714-893-8113 Ext. 128).

Overall, this seems like a very easy, straight-forward, and efficient way of dealing with RMA's.