Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: The KT400A in Retail Action

Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: Tech Support and RMA

For your reference, we will repost our tech 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'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.

Gigabyte's RMA policy is easy to follow and fairly good for a tier one motherboard maker like Gigabyte:

Gigabyte still hasn't changed their RMA policy. Like ASUS, Gigabyte would like you to deal with the vendor you purchased your motherboard from rather than directly 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 guys would adopt similar RMA policies akin to Epox, Albatron or AOpen's.

Unlike the last time we reviewed a Gigabyte motherboard, Gigabyte's tech support was very timely with their response. Not only did Gigabyte get back to us within 72 hours, but they got back to us in under 24 hours; 20 hours flat to be exact. Smaller motherboard makers usually respond to tech support emails quicker than large motherboard makers like Gigabyte because the small motherboard makers simply concentrate a bit more on tech support. Then again smaller motherboard makers don't receive nearly as much tech support emails as the larger manufacturers, but that is obviously good for the consumer.

We'd like to note that when we reviewed Gigabyte's SiS 655 motherboard, they did miss our 72 hour deadline. But after publishing that article we received a response from Gigabyte 11.5 hours later. In other words, it took Gigabyte tech support 83.5 hours to respond to our email in February. This month it took just 20 hours. Though that might seem slightly inconsistent, it's easily forgivable, and we're actually quite delighted with that pattern. Though Gigabyte has missed a couple 72 hour deadlines in previous reviews, only once did they not respond to our emails in a reasonable amount of time after the two instances that they missed our 72 hour deadline (83.5 hours is certainly forgivable, whereas there was one instance last year where Gigabyte ended up missing the 72 hour deadline by well more than just 11.5 hours).

Though Gigabyte's RMA policy is just adequate, their tech support response time is good and getting much better, especially this time around.