Disappointed customer

[tomelok]

Good morning

Firstly well done guys on the award! Despite all my problems with the Scan computer I purchased last year, generally your customer service has been excellent.

My admiration for your customer skills aside, I am very disappointed by the quality of the build of the
3XS Triad "Tian Di Hui". I have spent £4000 in one year, during which time it has been back twice for repair. Despite its elaborate water cooling and overclocking features, the slightest tweak casues the whole unit to become unstable and unuseable. After spending a small fortune on a computer that is outperformed both in terms of speed and reliability by my friends sub 1k Dell mail order - needless to say I am finding the constant mocking unsettling! It may be pretty but when you cant play World of Warcraft for 5 minutes without crashing, its beauty is just irritating.

I sent your customer care team, and emailed Ben and Philip my latest problems but no reply yet? So thought I would try to get your attention by posting here.

1) Ever since I have had this computer it has been unstable. 2 repairs from you guys, many email and phone fixes have never really resolved the issues. Eventually we went back to factory seetings rather than the overclocked version (that i paid extra for). On the last repair after spending £3500 on the initial outlay, I had you fit the GPU water cooling set, and an extra Hard drive for dual boot, Vista and XP. (2 * Raptors). This has been ok for the last 6 months with the odd crash here and there. But really, I would like the overclocked version I paid for.

2) Couple of months ago it refused to boot and just sat there looking at me. Eventually after about 20 minutes a screen comes up saying some kind of windows error. It allows you to exit but booting into VISTA you just had a frozen screen. Eventually Vista just didnt boot. I tried the usual fixes, including trying to re-install windows but when you do that it says the disk is corrupt. Normally I can boot up in XP and have a look at the drive from mycomputer, but its not displaying. I assume the drive is gone, or maybe there is an issue with the boot instructions? Not to sure but after paying an extra £500 for Vista ultimate and another raptor, Im pretty peeved that pretty much from when it was installed it has been crashy, and now wont work at all.

3) My latest issue is that the computer started to crash during games. I noticed using Nvidia Tune that one GPU (28800's in SLI) is running 50 degrees hotter than the other. (55 vs 110 degrees C). Its very hot to touch as well. I think there are air bubbles in the tubing or just a lack of coolant. I checked the original packaging and cannot see any tool to actually allow me to add some coolant or flush the system.

The computer is now unuseable for games. I have always been impressed with the customer service of SCAN, but really at the point I only really care about the fact that I have spent £4000 on a computer that has barely worked since i purchased it. It just does not seem fair. Please could you contact me so we can resolve. I was getting so desperate I was even looking at apple macs! Heaven help me!

Thanks in advace.

Regards

Brian

[Mossy]

TOMELOK

I am very sorry you feel this way about the Triad system we pride ourselves in the quality of our builds this is very important to Scan. I will make sure the correct people get this message and I will get someone to contact you asap.

Best Regards

[LoPan]

Tomelok - please keep us posted with what happens with regards to your PC. I'm on the lookout for a custom build company who overclock to recommend; the real crunch time is when things start going wrong.

Scan as a components supplier are ace but no experience with 3XS

[tomelok]

Update

Scan were there usual helpful selves and have arranged collection of the unit for Monday. Its a third repair in a year which I'm not thrilled about but thats what you get for buying cutting edge I guess. Always wait until its been out for a few months so other people iron out the problems for you! Will keep the thread updated with progress.

Regards

Tome

[Mossy]

We are looking into the issues please the me point out that it is not "build quality" which is the issue we will comment when we have the PC to see what our testing points to.

Regards

[tomelok]

I probably chose the wrong words when i said Build Quality. The quality of the build is actually excellent, it is very tidy inside the case and has a very impressive effect on all those that view it. A great deal of effort has gone into the build, that is clear to see. Actually I was referring more to the quality of the experience I am having with the computer. For a machine that is basicly designed for overclocking and performance it is frustrating to have to deal with its instability. I chose those words based on the fact that you guys built it and it does not deliver what it promised. However I always ensure i take the time to make it clear your customer service has always been excellent. As somebody who works in a similar field, I understand that sometimes a particular product just wont deliver when 99 apparently identical products work perfectly. For this reason I am very happy to recommend SCAN as a company you can rely on to do their best to resolve a customers problem. Hope that clears it up. Regards Tome

[tomelok]

Further update - Citylink visited to collect computer, only to refuse on the basis it was to heavy! Scan responded to the issue straight away by re-arranging delivery for tomorrow morning, but despite that its still very frustrating that the system will be away for an extra day! Im somewhat worried that they will send the same driver and the same result will happen tomorrow, but we will see what happens?!

Tome

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Brian

I will look into the issues with the 3XS System with Pete the engineer as soon as the system is received, we will keep you informed as to any issues we find with the system and any components that may need changing.

We are sorry you have experienced issues with the system and the collection via our courier (which is being investigated by customer services) and will work on your Triad system as a priority once it has been recieved in our repairs department

Ben Smith
3XS Systems Support Manager

[tomelok]

Update for anybody who is interested:

System was returned today after close to 7 weeks in repair. They changed the motherboard under warranty to the STRIKER. Also i requested the water cooling tubing to all be replaced as I prefer the new tubing to the old. A large part of the delay was because I ordered the AQUA AQUEREO and the one they had reserved for me was faulty after installation. I waited for ages for new stock to come in but it just didnt materalise so in the end I took matters into my own hands and got the part from another supplier and sent it to SCAN for installation.

There were various other issues aloong the way which also contributed to the delay. Connected the system up today and it took ages to boot into WINDOWS. Its supposed to be dual boot but I didnt get the option to boot into one or the other, so first problem there. When it finally booted none of my USB connections seemed to be working as my MOUSE and KEYBOARD were non functional. Tried another USB mouse thinking it could be the wireless mouse causing the problem. No difference. Reset the system only to find it wouldnt then boot, just kept saying NTLDR missing (Whatever that means) and to restart. Tried restarting few times and now it just hangs.

Cant begin to describe how disappointed I am. Spent close to 5k now on the system, this will potentially be the fourth time I have to send it back in 12 months if we cant fix it over the phone.

Relally cant fault the communication from Ben which was always excellent, and I do beleive there was genuine intent to get my system sorted and shipped out in good time. However when you have spent this much money and had this many issues your frustration turns to anger very quickly. I have emailed the guys today and I just hope we can come up with a resolution quickly. On a positive the new system looks incredible, black coolant with blue piping. Just wish I could actually switch it on!

Tome

[Mossy]

i will point Ben towards this on tuesday when we are back in work, other than your issues I wish you a good Easter Weekend.

Regards

[PeteG@Scan]

Hi Tome,

It sounds like a common issue and we'll be able to resolve this over the phone in a few minutes. The board was upgraded a second time before it left here from a striker I to a striker II due to the 680i revision being a end of life. The Striker II has a small button on the back of the motherboard (on the back panel itself) which clears the cmos should a user take an overclock too far. This is a populer feature of the Striker range which can sometimes be problematic if the end user isn't aware of it before hand.

Judging by the information you gave above it appears that as the machine was lifted out of the box or during set up, this button has been pressed and the cmos reset.

The system has both xp and vista installed, updated and properly stress tested during the last week whilst we were waiting for the aero to arrive. The fact your not seeing them now is confirmed by the fact that the boot sequence has changed as indicated by the missing NTLDR error.

This file is the instructional file that tells windows how to proceed with loading itself and if it isn't the first item on the first harddrive in the boot sequence, the machine will fail to boot. It does sound like windows went through the complete hardware detection setup on the first boot and failed to locate everything due to the lack of bootfile when loading a singler version of windows. If we get the drives set back up in the currect order in the bios this will resolve itself and the machine will return to the same status as when it left here.

If you go into the bios during the loading proceedings, you will see under one of the sub menus ( i think off hand it's the second from the right in the bios) an option to load and save settings. The second one should be a saved bios setup that has the overclock settings for this system as well as the currect drive sequence to have the system boot up currectly. If this one fails to work try save postion one, as I did try a number of different configerations on that system over the time it was here.

Ben will be in touch today to help you with this, or any other questions you have about setting up the system now it has been returned.

I'm sorry that your use of the machine disrupted by this over the weekend, but it should be a quick and painless resolve to fix it.