Unhappy - RMA replacement

[Oldjim]

This is one major argument for only buying parts where the manufacturer has a UK representative as then it would be reasonably easy to send it back to them under the terms of the warranty and get a repair or a replacement of equal performance.

[not_my_ip]

yeah, I think manufacturer should deal with this and replace card, or give better. I remember my mate has similar problem with HDD , went strait to seagate and got better and bigger disk . Of course scan as retailer wont do this because they would lose money in that way. But question is why saphire would not do it?

[Nelly.]

Lets look back a sec. . . .

The card is under warranty for 24 months in which it is still covered, a year with the retailer & a year with the manufacturer.

In that case it's up to Sapphire to repair or replace the card with the same product or better.

Why cannot Scan sort out the RMA for you with Sapphire? I assume thats what most normal retailers would do, Sapphire have offices in the USA & their head office is in Hong Kong.

IF Sapphire are not prepared to do the correct RMA procedure, once this is done if you dont recieve it back repaired or replaced within 30 days then I would get trading standards involved - you will definitly get it sorted then by consumer rights/law.

[Ferral]

Looking at the Sapphire boards the fault with the origional X1950 pro is quite common. The VRM's overheat and when they hit around 120 celcius they shut down and causes the whole system to crash or get a display driver stopped responding error.

They did change the cooling system on the newer cards that were released with better heatsinks on the VRM's which appears to have solved the problem. Nowhere does it say though that it is a manufacturing fault, they just suddenly changed the design.

So there lies the problem, not a design fault as such with the card itself but the origional cooling system was inadequate and did not cool the VRM's. Hence a 25 page thread on the Sapphire forums about this fault.

VR zone also done an article on this, there were 2 manufacturers that they came across the same fault. VRM's hitting high temperatures within 2 minutes of a 3D app starting. Now it is possible to sort the cooling out yourself but the downside to that is the fact that it voids any warranties.

So unfortunately it is a catch 22 situation and Scan are kind of caught in the middle of it. On the other hand though, Scan have stepped up to the plate and have been good enough to do this warranty instead of just telling me to pursue Sapphire (a lot of e tailers would just send you packing after the first year, thats what happened to me previously but not by Scan).

So now I'm just waiting to hear back from them to see what they manage to sort out for me. I have a lot of respect for them and the way they are trying to help me out now, I really don't want to be awkward at all. Just hope I hear back from them soon as I know they are really busy at the minute, they are testing a X1950 GT I believe it is for me. Granted the core and memory is a bit lower than the pro but if it works and runs my games I will be happy. Can't see there being a great difference between the pro and gt in all honesty.